I Hired Ambition. I Forgot to Manage It.
For nearly twenty years, I have worked with ambitious people. Eventually, I realised one of them had been working with me the entire time, and I had forgotten to manage it.
It has followed me through consulting, retail, defence, transport and cyber security, across different industries, technologies and challenges. It has been the quiet force that encouraged me to take on unfamiliar problems, learn continuously and step into situations where I wasn’t always certain I had all the answers.
For the most part, ambition has been a wonderful companion. It has opened doors, created opportunities and pushed me beyond the boundaries I would have otherwise accepted. But over time, I realised that ambition has an interesting personality trait: it is excellent at getting things started, but it is not always good at knowing when to stop.
Ambition rarely arrives announcing that it plans to take over your life. It is much more subtle than that. It begins by asking for a little extra effort. An evening here, a weekend there, one more revision before a deadline. Each individual request seems reasonable. The problem is that reasonable decisions accumulate, and before you realise it, your exception has quietly become your normal.
Consulting taught me this lesson particularly well. The work itself is genuinely rewarding. There is something satisfying about walking into a complex situation, understanding the moving parts and helping organisations navigate uncertainty. But consulting also has a unique relationship with time. A deadline does not care whether it falls before a public holiday, and a “quick final review” has a remarkable ability to become a completely new version of the document.
I remember working through an Easter holiday on a project where we were preparing deliverables under a tight timeline. Like most consulting work, there was a genuine reason for the urgency. The team cared about producing something valuable, and everyone was committed to getting it right. Yet somewhere between the first draft, the feedback cycle and the final refinements, I found myself looking at Slide 27 and wondering how it had survived so many transformations. It had been reviewed, rewritten and resurrected so many times that I was convinced it had lived more lives than a cat.
The funny thing is that nobody had instructed me to give up that weekend. Nobody had explicitly asked me to prioritise work over everything else. The pressure came from somewhere much closer to home: my own expectations. Ambition had convinced me that slowing down meant falling behind.
That realisation changed the way I thought about achievement. The problem was never ambition itself. Ambition is what helps people grow, build expertise and take on challenges that initially seem beyond them. The problem was allowing ambition to become the only measure of progress.
Eventually, I realised that I was very good at managing projects, risks and stakeholder expectations, but I was not always applying the same discipline to managing myself.
In cyber security, we understand that systems require resilience. We build redundancy, monitor performance and create recovery mechanisms because we know that operating at maximum capacity leaves no room for unexpected events. Yet many of us forget to apply the same principles to ourselves.
I started creating small routines that belonged to me rather than my calendar. Physical training became my anchor because it gave structure to weeks that could otherwise disappear into meetings, workshops and deadlines. Predictably, I approached it with the same mindset I had applied to work.
I tried to optimise it.
My smartwatch became less of a fitness tracker and more of a tiny middle manager. Every morning, it reviewed my sleep, activity and recovery scores with the quiet confidence of someone preparing my annual performance review. At some point I realised I had managed to turn relaxation into another project with metrics, targets and improvement opportunities.
It was amusing but also revealing. Many of our strengths contain the seeds of their own problems. Discipline can become rigidity. High standards can become perfectionism. Commitment can become an inability to step away. The qualities that help us build careers can quietly become the things that make those careers harder to sustain.
Over time, my definition of success has changed. Earlier in my career, I measured progress by how much I could achieve. Today, I pay more attention to whether that achievement is sustainable. I admire people who remain curious after twenty years, who continue learning without losing their humility, and who can deliver exceptional outcomes without creating unnecessary chaos around them.
The longer I work, the more I believe that experience does not necessarily make us more certain. It makes us more aware of what we do not know. It teaches us to question our assumptions, listen more carefully and recognise that there is usually more happening beneath the surface than we can see.
Ambition still plays an important role in my career. I still enjoy difficult problems. I still like learning new things. I still feel energised by opportunities that challenge me. The difference is that ambition no longer gets to make every decision.
It has a seat at the table.
It just does not chair the meeting.
Because careers are built over decades, not deadlines. The frameworks will evolve, the presentations will eventually become outdated and even Slide 27 will one day find its retirement home.
The person doing the work is the one who has to continue. That is the asset worth protecting.
Ambition remains one of the most valuable employees I have ever had. It works hard, pushes boundaries and constantly looks for what is possible.
But like any talented employee with too much enthusiasm and too much authority, it occasionally needs a reminder of who is actually in charge.