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Key points
- Advisors often urge us to aim for the top jobs in a field, rather than consider what we want for ourselves.
- Our needs for competence and achievement can be fulfilled outside of the most prestigious jobs.
- Reframing success to be in line with one's interests and skills may lead to better career decisions.
You would expect a story in which a former CEO finds work as a receptionist to detail a fall from grace. Yet the slim, well-kept older man taking my information late one evening in an empty hospital waiting room said he just got tired of the job and wanted to do something else.
And years later, when I asked my former mechanic, who had been a vice president in a Fortune 500 bank, why he owned a small shop on a street full of mechanics with small shops, he leaned back in a tattered chair and said, “Why not?”
People rarely follow "What would you like to be when you grow up?" with "What would you like to do after that?" Instead, mentors and advisors often frame success as a one-way trip toward specific, prestigious, high-paid employment. This view neglects both the possibility of life leading a person down another road and the impossibility of dividing one million physicians, six million CEOs, and variety of other high-status roles by one hundred sixty million people. It can also leave someone asking “Now what?” after they achieved their goal and realize there’s plenty of life left to live.
Research suggests ambition is normal. However, the desire to reach the apex of a field doesn’t appear to be a need as defined by Abraham Maslow. Rather, esteem needs include a “desire for a stable, . . . (usually) high evaluation of” oneself, based on “real capacity, achievement, and respect from others.” Esteem needs also include achievement, independence, and freedom.
One does not need to reach the highest heights to fulfill this need. Indeed, the Peter principle states that people tend to get promoted based on their success in prior jobs rather than on their skill set, leading them to “rise to a level of respective incompetence.” But since requesting a demotion is often frowned upon, one may have to leave a place of business they enjoy to work again in a position where they feel competent.
Additionally, moving up the ladder too quickly may strain personal relationships—a need Maslow claimed emerges before the esteem need. Many people seem aware of this combination of needs intuitively, fulfilling their needs even though they land in the middle of the pack.
But what about money? In March 2023, researchers learned that happiness tends to increase with income, but not for everyone. For the happiest people, the increase tends to accelerate after one earns about $100,000. However, the increase in happiness tends to plateau in the unhappiest people after one earns about $100,000. If one expects, from past experience, additional income to not increase their happiness, they may choose to stop seeking out higher positions.
Meanwhile, tastes vary. One might prefer spending $300,000 on half an acre of land in North Carolina to $1 million on an 800 square foot apartment in New York City. Even if more money might boost their happiness, they may wish to avoid the well-documented stresses associated with many higher paying jobs. Or, it could be a matter of culture. Some would rather go out back every night and barbecue hot dogs and chicken to getting dressed up and dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Choosing another path may be easy for an older person who has obtained a high position, mastered their craft, and earned enough for retirement. But research suggests that younger people may have a harder time stepping off the path they set themselves on. This is because they are more sensitive to sunk costs, which are more recent in time for them, relatively speaking.
A sunk cost is a logical fallacy whereby a person takes time or money they already spent and can’t get back into making future decisions. However, the time or money is irrelevant to the future decision. For example, becoming a lawyer is typically a five-year process: three years of school, one year to get in, and one year to pass the bar exam and get licensed. More if that student has had their sights set on law school since the first year of college.
Some number of people will realize early in their first year that they don’t want to be a lawyer. They don’t like the work. Or any number of factors. However, some will stick out the next few years, amassing loans and foregoing other opportunities because of the time they already put in. Odds are they leave the profession shortly after passing the bar, having achieved their goal.
For most of us, it seems, life sorts itself out. We follow our ambitions as long as we’re happy, then move on to something else when we’re ready. However, it's easy to look to money and prestige as a way to meet needs such as security and love. And it's easy to see examples of someone else with more than you in our current world. Reframing success and achievement as a process of finding a good fit for one’s skills and interests at that point in life while also earning an adequate income might help people find good fits sooner in life.
