Some families punish ambition as vanity; some punish it as disloyalty, a wish to rise above one’s people. Either way the child learns to want quietly, and to distrust anyone who wants aloud.
Where you meet it
At work
You roll your eyes at the ‘political’ ones, never put your own name forward, and feel it in your gut every time someone less careful gets the job.
In love
You have to be the one who doesn’t need to win, which is its own way of winning. Every argument ends with you being reasonable and them feeling handled.
In bed
The fantasy is about command: pinning someone down and telling them exactly what to do, or being pinned and told. In the room you negotiate it away into taking turns. Nobody kneels. Nobody is ordered. What is left is fair, considerate, and faintly dead, and you call that maturity.
Among others
A confident stranger reads as arrogant within one sentence. You have a lot to say about people who love the sound of their own voice.
The tell
You give advice from the sidelines and resent the people on the field.
What it protects
The fear that to want more is to become the kind of person you were raised to despise.
The figure speaks
I’ve watched you give it away for twenty years. Room after room where you knew, precisely, what ought to be done, and you said nothing, and let a smaller man say it badly. The Modest One. They handed you that name and you wear it as though you chose it.
You were taught that wanting aloud is vanity, or worse, disloyalty, a wish to rise above your own people. So I want down here instead, at full volume. Don’t pretend you can’t hear me. The eye-roll at the political ones is mine. So is the drop in your gut when the job goes elsewhere. So is the fantasy you won’t name: somebody pinned and told exactly what to do, or you pinned and told. In the room you negotiate it into taking turns. Nobody kneels. Nobody is commanded. What’s left is fair and considerate and faintly dead, and you call that maturity.
I want the chair. Not the applause, the chair. I want you to decide one thing in daylight with your name on it and carry whatever follows. Ask me what I would have built by now. I’ll tell you, and it’ll take all night.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
The gold
Legitimate authority. The willingness to decide, to carry the consequences, and to be visible while doing it.
Practices for this week
- 1List three people whose ambition irritates you. Beside each, write the quality you would keep if you allowed yourself to have it.
- 2Take the lead on one small thing this week without seeking permission or consensus first.
- 3Write a dialogue with the figure on the throne. Ask what it would build if you let it. Then ask what it fears you would lose.
The statements that listen for it
Three statements in the reflection score this figure, one through each lens. Reading them cold is a small test of its own.
People who openly want the promotion, the title, or the spotlight strike me as arrogant before they’ve done a thing wrong.
The trigger
I make very sure nobody could ever say I’m in it for power, status, or control.
The rule
In meetings I usually know what should happen, keep quiet, and then it stings when someone less careful just takes charge.
The leak