Ambition

It's the middle of the year, so that means it's time for semi-annual reviews. Reviews are always a little difficult for me - in part because I was raised to believe that it was morally wrong to, as the saying goes, blow your own trumpet. This belief is so ingrained that in the past I've had difficulty with writing a CV or even effectively answering questions regarding my previous accomplishments during an interview for a position.

There's more here than just my ingrained beliefs, however; more that relates to ambition and how others perceive it. More that we in the corporate world refuse to discuss because we all know what the words and concepts mean. We are so convinced we know the meaning that we really need not think about the words or the concepts they convey. However, I wonder if perhaps it is that we don't really understand ambition, even though we think we know the definition.^[1]

As a case-in-point, I recently received a message from a former coworker - I'll call him Mr. Foo - that I'm going to paraphrase here, removing references that will identify who it was or which employer we shared in common. All edits will be enclosed in *[ and ]* to identify them.

When I was at *[our common employer]*, I was full of ambition and could not for the life of me figure out why you didn't put a ton of effort into sharing your *[tools]* with the *[rest of the employees there]* in a more formal fashion than just have them 755^[2] in your home dir.
... 

*[It]* might sound kind of weird, but in this weird way that chosen inaction on your part really stuck with me and I've always respected and always will respect you as an awesome developer and wise person in general...and time to time I think "well, Robert had this awesome stuff and didn't really share it or align himself with movement x y or z". There's wisdom in your actions, I think, and its taken me a while to come around to understanding that.

Now, I might have shared this message because this person referred to me as "an awesome developer" (and yes, I appreciate "awesome developer" more than "wise person" - it's better geek cred) and it's not really blowing my own trumpet because Mr. Foo has done it for me - that sort of ego stroking always feels good, but that's really not why I share it.

My thought today is this - most of us - and by most I mean nearly all, have become convinced that ambition and self-promotion are inseparable. They are not. Few of us have difficulty with people who are ambitious - at least to a small degree; however, more than a few have difficulty with those eager for self-promotion - people who, as they say in the western US are "all hat and no cattle"^[3]. While ambition is a necessary condition for self-promotion, it is not a sufficient condition.

My experience of the cycle of self-promotion rampant in corporate culture has been one that has shown it to be one of the most emotionally damaging issues confronting humanity. It is a vampiric greed that drains the soul of a person, because just as for the gun-fighter of the old west, there is always someone faster or willing to cheat just a little, and in the end you're just as dead.

In honesty, I created the tools Mr Foo references to make work easier - for me, sure, but for anyone who used them. I promoted the tools (not myself as author) on several occasions as something that could help resolve a problem but if others didn't use them I wasn't offended - I decided to not be bothered by the action of others.

That is not to say there aren't consequences for avoiding self-promotion. There are. It would be nice if the world - or our little part of it - were the meritocracy we teach our children it is - one where management paid less attention to self-promotion than work. Unfortunately, life is not nice - nor is the corporate world. If you're going to avoid self-promotion - the grasping greed of blind ambition - be prepared to get punched in the face, hard. People around you will not understand, and will likely criticize, your lack of ambition. Of course what they really mean is that you don't share their goals, but that will not be how it is put forward - this isn't a cooperative game with a win-win outcome, this is a bare-knuckle fist fight because people don't like what they don't understand, and people don't understand others who refuse to engage in self-promotion.

The good news, however, is that while self-promotion may not keep you from getting punched in the face, without it you're more likely to keep your soul in the exchange.

To Mr. Foo, if you're reading this and recognize your words, thanks for everything.

Notes:

1. Ambition: (a) an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power; (b) desire to achieve a particular end
2. 755 is the numeric representation of permissions for a file that indicates it is readable and executable by users on the network but only modifiable by the owner
3. Full of big talk, but no action; pretentious