Success That No One Sees. How to Fight Ambition Inflation
I was recently exposed to Gresham’s Law, which is an OG economic principle that states, “bad money drives out good money”.
Why would an inferior thing drive out a superior thing? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
In researching I found that the law originated from using precious metals for coins, which affected their value. Coins used to be made with precious metals. Over the years, coin composition evolved to include base metals. This led to people hoarding the old (gold) coins and spending the new (alloy) coins.
Economists would say, Gresham’s Law tells a story of face value versus intrinsic value, but I couldn’t help but notice how nicely this is mapped to ambition drift and the story of counterfeit success versus authentic success.
Culturally we are obsessed with material success. In reaction to this, many of us will compromise who we are for what we want.
We call this Ambition Drift!
When our ambition drifts, success becomes very superficial, performative, and transactional. It becomes more about “them” and less about us. It becomes more about showing than knowing.
Counterfeit success overly emphasizes “face value”, it’s about the appearance of success (the post, the title, the following, the possessions, the aesthetic), and overtime the “intrinsic value” of pursuits (those things associated with authentic success) gets discussed less, becomes less visible, eventually becoming a relic of popular culture.
Have you noticed how quickly this shift appears to be happening? The pace is dizzying!
Social medial algorithms are producing templates for “success” by the minute. How can we make sense of all this change? What’s real? What’s fake?
Here’s a hint… Fake moves fast!
Genuine growth is slow, quiet, and would be considered “un-postable” by modern cultural standards so people stop displaying it.
Like the pure metal coins of the past, authentic success feels too valuable to “spend” in a market that rewards cheap, fast, counterfeit success.
Counterfeit success circulates faster because the barrier to entry is so low. You don’t need to do the soul-searching required for authentic success; you just need to follow a “blueprint” you saw online.
Furthermore, counterfeit success is designed to be seen, optimized for virality which gives it a much higher velocity in the cultural marketplace than the quiet anonymity associated with the pursuit of authentic success.
The consequence of all this sharing of counterfeit success is ambition inflation.
The fake drives out the real! And the fake keeps growing.
This explains why culturally we’re experiencing all of these paradoxes.
We have more “hustle” than ever, but less meaningful progress
We have more “connection”, but in the midst of a loneliness epidemic
We have more "achievement" but everything feels “empty”, devoid of meaning
We’ve all personally experienced this.
Think of a time you’ve achieved something that “looked” great to others but felt empty to you.
Contrast that with a “quiet win” that no one saw but that fueled you for months, years even.
How do we combat this trend?
The first step is acknowledging that the truth about authentic success is being twisted. This shouldn’t come as a surprise! That’s why counterfeits exist, to deceive and/or defraud.
The truth is authentic success is often largely attributed to things that are simply unglamorous.
It involves uneventful, long-term consistency, and periods of zero recognition.
These moments don’t “share” well on social media, they have almost zero “social appeal” in the short term, but believe me they’re happening quietly all around you. Gold, hiding in plain sight.
The “gold” is the freshman football player who has shown up to every off-season lift, for the past 4 months, getting after it and making significant “invisible” progressive despite an understanding that they may not see meaningful varsity minutes for another 2 years.
The “gold" is the person who is working on a massive project and hasn’t told a soul. They are intentionally avoiding the “Cheap Dopamine” that comes from posting about doing something before the “actual doing” has begun
The “gold” is the leader who spends an hour a week with a struggling junior employee, knowing that the “payoff” won’t show up on a quarterly KPI for months, possibly longer. They aren’t going to be seen as a servant leader on LinkedIn; they are doing it because that’s the type of person they are.
The point is, there is still a lot of high quality, inspiring work being done by people in pursuit of authentic success.
It’s just not being broadcast all over social media!
Instead, it’s out there compounding quietly.
Join the movement.
