Is ambition just insecurity in disguise?

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 Linked In 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 forces in human achievement. Because if Spinoza framed ambition as a pathological yearning for approval, Alfred Adler went further still, locating its engine in the inferiority complex — the idea that our relentless striving for superiority and recognition is fundamentally compensatory, a response to the nagging inner suspicion that we are not quite enough. The more we doubt ourselves, Adler argued, the more urgently we must persuade others — and ourselves — that we are smart, successful, admirable, worthy. Ambition, on this reading, is not a strength of character but a symptom of insecurity. What if that’s precisely what makes it so productive? {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Ch