Is ambition just insecurity in disguise?

The pros and cons of status anxiety.

BY Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Spinoza, never one for flattery, defined ambition as the immoderate desire to make others approve of what we love and hate — in essence, an insatiable craving for other people’s validation. Today, that sounds like a brutal takedown of one of our most celebrated virtues. Ambition has become a word we wear proudly, the engine of LinkedIn bios and graduation speeches, the quality every hiring manager claims to want and every self-help book promises to unlock. And yet Spinoza, writing in the seventeenth century, was onto something that modern psychology has spent considerable effort confirming: ambition, at its root, may be less about drive than about anxiety. Less about what we want to achieve, and more about what we fear people will think of us if we don’t.

This is not merely a philosophical provocation. It is, I would argue, a genuinely useful lens for understanding one of the most consequential and underexamined........

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