TL;DR
To be honest, I don’t know how to explain this into a single sentence yet.
Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?
The good intentioned, but not well socialized, ambitious person who wanted to achieve greatness.
My Practical Experience
I used to be that guy who took his job too seriously.
But there’s something that all people who take their jobs too seriously fail to account for:
People make up business
I would only make connections and talk just for the benefit of “fitting in”, so that I can later use people to help climb up the corporate ladder.
I even once asked a question to my manager, something along the lines of,
“Does proposals that contain the right people have a higher chance of being accepted?”
To which he responded with,
“This is a pretty political question…[continues with rest of answer]”.
The point is, people who take their jobs too seriously fail to realize that:
- no one cares
- To gain respect, first understand that people care more about themselves than they do about other people–simply a fact of human nature
- If you want to be ambitious, you can set your owns goals, but you must not hold others to those standards–in other words, YOU get to be the one who does it all, you don’t need as many people as you think, and if you do, it’s because you’ve spread yourself out too thin.
- you are your own greatest point of leverage
That being said, continue to work hard, but do so in an almost comedic way.
Go out, have hobbies that are opposite to what you work on, and get a life.
And look, I get it. You’re motivated my the idea of hard work and commitment to something bigger than yourself. I was there, but this isn’t the 1950s anymore. Times have changed.
It was Charles Darwin who demonstrated that adaptability is the strongest trait for an organism to survive.
It’s possible to retain your core ideals while adapting to how to express and realize those ideals into this constantly changing world.
Thanks for the advice, now how can I practically put this to use in a simple way for daily execution?
The worst fate for this ambitious person is to have it all, but at the expense of relationships.
The way you treat your coworkers spills out to the way you treat everyone. And believe me, one of the coldest pains in life is being rejected by people after working so hard on a goal you thought was going to earn you approval and respect.
It’s already been proved with Harry Howlow, Abraham Maslow, and Erik Erikson, that intimate relationships matter far more than mere things.
And here’s the best part: there are people who are highly ambitious, rich, successful, AND well liked by many. People like Joe Rogan, Mr. Beast, Mark Cuban, Alex Hormozi, David Goggins, Patrick Bet-David.
It’s absolutely possible to get there, which is why allowing your curiosity to help you get there is a blessing.