You don't want more, you want above (and that's the most dangerous thing about you)

 what psychopaths in the C-suite taught me about my own ambition

You don't want more.

You want above.

Most people will read that and think it doesn't apply to them (it's always the other guy, the boss, the ex, the founder who won't stop posting). Stay with me for 3 minutes and see if it survives contact with your own life. It didn't survive contact with mine.

A few years ago I turned down a request from someone who worked with me.

It was a small thing. A schedule change, maybe a day off. The details are gone, which is the point.

I said no.

There was a reason ready. A decent one. And for about 3 days the reason felt like the whole story.

Then I was on a walk and the real thing surfaced, the way it always does when you stop looking at it directly.

I said no because I could.

The decision was mine. Someone had to wait on it. And some small, quiet part of me enjoyed that more than it enjoyed being right.

I didn't like finding that. I still don't.

Most people, when they find something like that, look away fast and go back to the flattering version. I get it. But the ugly stuff is usually where the useful information is.

So I went looking for what that feeling actually was.

And the place I found the clearest answer was the last place you'd expect.

Research on psychopaths.

I – I was reading about them and kept seeing me

Here's the setup.

Now, for most of a century, psychopathy research was about what's missing. No empathy. No fear. No guilt. No attachment. That's useful if you're explaining why someone hurt a stranger. It's useless if you're explaining why someone spent 15 years climbing to VP and then quietly gutted 3 departments.

A missing brake doesn't move a car.

You still need an engine.

You see, a group of researchers finally asked the engine question: forget what these people lack, what do they want? They gave a few thousand people standard values questionnaires (the kind psychologists have used for decades) and looked at who scored high on psychopathic traits and what those people said mattered to them.

They wanted power. Strongly. They wanted pleasure. They wanted money and stuff (shocking, I know).

They did not want achievement.

Read that again, because in most people those two travel together. The person who wants to run the thing usually also wants to be good* at the thing. The title and the skill are one ambition.

In psychopathy, that link snaps. Power without competence.

And then the finding that made me put the paper down.

They weren't primarily interested in having a lot.

They were interested in having more than you.

Given the choice between earning a good salary while everyone around them earned a bit less, or earning a better salary while everyone around them earned more, they took the first option. Less money, higher position. Same pattern for education. Same pattern for vacation time. The absolute amount was negotiable. The gap was not.

Greed wants more.

This wants above.

In other words, they'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a slightly bigger fish in the ocean.

And the second I read that, I was back on that walk.

Because "I said no because I could" isn't a want for more. Nothing came to me from saying no. No money, no time, no praise. The only thing I got was the gap. Me deciding, them waiting.

I don't think I'm a psychopath. Statistically, about 1 in 100 people reading this might be, and they've probably already closed the tab, because none of this is uncomfortable to them.

But the wiring is the same wiring. It's just louder in them.

II – Three engines, and the one that runs alone

Here's a useful way to look at ambition: 3 motives. Psychologists have circled these since the 1980s and I've never found a cleaner cut.

1. Affiliation – You want to belong. The team, the family, the guild. Doing things with people is the reward.

2. Achievement – You want to get better. There's a version of you that can do this well, and closing that gap is the point.

3. Domination – You want to be above. Status, hierarchy, being the one who decides. The gap between you and the next person is the reward.

All 3 are in you. They're in everyone. Most people have never once asked which one is actually driving.

They're older than you, too. Chimps run dominance hierarchies. Wolves do. Your nervous system was tuning rank before language existed, which is why losing an argument on the internet to a stranger you'll never meet can ruin a whole afternoon. Nothing was lost. The rank system doesn't know that. Dominance motivation isn't a defect. Every social animal on earth runs it, and without it nobody would ever organize anything. Somebody has to decide.

The question is never "do you have it."

The question is what is it mixed with.

Because here's what the research on the so-called dark personalities showed when you line them up. Narcissists want to be above you too, but they also want to be admired for being good at something, and they want you around to do the admiring. That's a leash. Thin, but a leash. If they abuse you, they lose their audience.

In psychopathy, dominance shows up alone.

No achievement to make them want to actually be competent.

No affiliation to make them care whether you're still standing afterward.

Just above.

More with nothing to want it for. Above with nobody to be above with.

That's the whole mechanism, and once you see it you can't unsee it. That's why the same personality that can't hold a job in one version becomes a senior executive in another. The prison version has the dominance drive plus impulsivity, chaos, no long game. The corporate version has the same drive plus self-control, charm, and the patience to play a 10-year game. The naive picture of a psychopath is the twitchy one. The twitchy one gets caught. The one who costs an organization millions is calm, bold, likeable in interviews, and completely uninterested in you as a person.

Of course they rise. Positions of power are the one environment where "above" gets fed all day, legally, with a salary.

But I promised you this letter isn't about them.

It's about what happens to a normal person when the third engine gets quietly louder than the other two.

III – Your company is a PvP server and you think you're playing co-op

Now, let me give you the frame that made this click for me, and then I'll put it down.

Think about why people play games.

Some players are there for the dungeon. Beat it, max the skill tree, see the ending. If they replay, it's to do it better. Speedrunners are the purest form (I'm looking at you, the guy who's beaten the same game 400 times). The opponent is the game and the previous version of you.

That's achievement.

Some players are there for the raid. They show up Tuesday night because the guild needs a healer and those are their friends. They'd quit the game if the guild dissolved.

That's affiliation.

And some players are there to grief.

They don't care about the dungeon. They don't care about the guild. They care that you're at 10% health and they're at 100%, and the gap is the entire game. A griefer will happily take a worse build if it lets him camp your spawn point. Less absolute power. More relative power.

Now here's the part that matters.

A smart griefer doesn't stay a griefer.

He joins the guild.

He learns the vocabulary. He shows up on time. He's a great recruit for 6 months, because charm is cheap when you don't feel anything about the person you're charming. And once he has the officer role, the server is PvP for everyone except him.

The lesson: A hierarchy doesn't just reward people who want the top. It attracts the people for whom the top is the only thing worth wanting.

Alright, you get it. Metaphor's done its job. Back to you.

IV – How "more" quietly turns into "above" in a normal life

You were not born wanting above.

But look at where you've spent your time. Most people spend the first 25 years of their life inside ranking machines and then wonder why they can't stop comparing.

School ranked you. Not "did you learn this," but "where did you land relative to 30 other kids." Religion, for a lot of people, ranked you too (holier than, more devout than, the family that sits in the front row). The gym ranks you by the number on the bar next to you, not by the number you lifted last month. Work ranks you. Every performance review is a position, not a measurement. And then we built a machine whose entire product is your relative position, delivered to your pocket every 30 seconds, with a little number on it. (AI is about to make this worse, not better. When anyone can produce competent work in 10 minutes, competence stops being a differentiator, and the only thing left to compete on is position.)

Spend 15 years inside systems like that and you don't have to be wired for domination.

You'll get trained* into it.

It happens in tiny substitutions you never notice:

You start wanting the promotion, and somewhere along the way you stop wanting to be good at the job the promotion is for.

You start wanting your business to grow, and somewhere along the way growth stops meaning "help more people" and starts meaning "bigger than his."

You start wanting to be respected, and somewhere along the way respect stops meaning "they learned from me" and starts meaning "they need my approval."

You start wanting a good relationship, and somewhere along the way "good" stops meaning "we're both better for it" and starts meaning "I'm the one who gets to be right."

Same words. Different engine. And I want to say it again because it's the whole letter: more is about the amount; above is about the gap. More can be satisfied. Above can't, because someone can always close the gap by doing well, and then you have to hurt them or move the target.

And the tell is always the same: it doesn't feel like ambition changed. It feels like ambition, the whole way down. Nobody wakes up and says "today I'd like to want the wrong thing." You just notice, one day on a walk, that you enjoyed saying no.

With that said, here's the distinction that came out of the same body of research, and I think it's the most practical idea in this letter.

There are 2 ways to rise in any human group.

Prestige is rank people give you because you're useful and they want to learn from you.

Dominance is rank you take through control and intimidation.

Both work. Both produce influence. Only one requires you to actually be worth following, and only one survives you losing the ability to punish people.

If you want a quick read on which one someone is running, watch what happens when they lose the ability to punish. Prestige stays. Dominance evaporates in a week.

When achievement leaves the building, prestige becomes unavailable. You can't be given rank for skill you didn't build. So the only route left is the other one.

That's the slide. Not from good to evil. From earned to taken, one substitution at a time.

V – How to tell when above has taken over your ambition

You can't run a clinical checklist on yourself, and if you could you'd cheat.

Most people never check at all. They assume ambition is ambition.

But motives leak. Here's what I've started watching for in me. Run these on yourself, not on your boss. The version of this list that's about your boss is a different, worse letter.

1) The relative test. When someone near you wins, what happens in the first 3 seconds, before you get your face under control? Achievement is mildly interested. Affiliation is glad. Above goes quiet, and within a week there's a small correction: a joke at their expense, a "concern," a reframing of their win as luck. You don't need more. You need the gap restored.

2) The number or the rank. Picture the thing you're working toward. Now picture getting it while 3 people you know get a bigger version. Does it still feel like winning? If the answer is a flat no (be honest, nobody's grading this), you never wanted the number. You wanted the rank, and the number was the excuse.

3) Build or be needed. Do you want influence so you can make something, or so that people have to come through you? These feel identical from the inside. From the outside, one produces work and the other produces bottlenecks.

4) Can you be passed. Is there anyone you love enough that you'd be genuinely happy to be overtaken by them? Not "fine with it." Happy. If you have to think about it, the engine is louder than you thought.

5) Can you put it down. Is there a position of control in your life right now that you don't need, that you're keeping anyway? A role, a permission, a "run it by me first"? Try giving one away this month. Watch what your body does. Hell, watch what your excuses do.

Now, if you got 3 or more, don't panic, and don't start diagnosing everyone around you either. That's exactly the move a dominance-driven mind wants to make. "The problem is them" is the gap restored one more time.

Do this instead.

Put achievement back in front, on purpose. Pick 1 skill in your actual craft and set a standard for it that has nothing to do with anyone else. A page count. A shipping cadence. A conversation you can hold in a language you couldn't 6 months ago. Achievement's definition is that the opponent is you. Give yourself an opponent that is you.

Take the prestige route explicitly. If you want influence, and you do, get it the way it can be given: be so useful that people hand it to you. Teach what you know in public. Make the person next to you better and let them take the credit. This will feel like losing if above is steering. That feeling is the diagnostic, not the verdict.

Make staying the metric. The people with dominance running alone have one hole you can see from orbit: nobody stays. So count who has worked with you twice. Who would again. Build that number the way other people build followers.

Change the environment before it finishes its work. If you're inside a system where the only visible reward is relative rank, you will drift toward wanting it no matter how many journals you fill. I left the 9-5 for a lot of reasons, and one of the honest ones is that I didn't like who the ladder was turning me into. Sometimes the strategic move is a new team. Sometimes it's a new game.

VI – The person who should lead is usually the one who has to be talked into it

Let's zoom out.

Here's the thing about "above" when it takes over. It doesn't announce itself. It borrows the language of the other two engines. It calls itself standards. It calls itself leadership. It calls itself "just being competitive."

The research on psychopaths is useful not because it lets you spot them. Most people read it that way, and it's the least useful way to read it.

It's useful because it shows you what one motive looks like when it runs completely alone, with nothing to dilute it, so you can recognize the same motive in yourself at 5% instead of 100%.

Power is a resource. Somebody in every room is going to hold it. And the person most hungry to hold it is often the last person who should, because the hunger itself is a sign that the other two engines went quiet.

Which means the people who should lead usually have to be talked into it. They wanted to be good at the thing. They wanted the people around them to be okay. The position was a side effect.

Be intense enough about your craft that influence finds you.

Be unbothered enough about rank that you could give it back tomorrow.

Most people will use this letter to diagnose their boss.

Don't. That's the gap talking.

Use it to catch the moment your own ambition stops asking how good can I become and starts asking how many people can I get above. Then put achievement back in the driver's seat and get to work.