Ask HR: What is the measure for personal fulfilment?
What you need to know:
- To broach the other issue you have raised, personal fulfilment is nuanced and idiosyncratic.
- Barring considerations of externally imposed benchmarks of career success, personal fulfilment largely tags at intrinsic motivations, values and the meaning individuals lend their lives.
- It encompasses different aspects for different individuals including, among others, wealth, personal wellbeing, growth, meaningful relationships, and altruistic endeavours.
A speaker at a recent career talk stated that without high ambition, career progress and fulfilment would remain elusive, if not impossible. Can one be too ambitious? What is the measure for personal fulfilment?
Ambition does indeed imbue individuals with determination and vigour that propels them towards their goals. Without it, inertia and ennui would choke aspirations and prospects of success. This viewpoint supports the traditional valorisation of ambition as the engine that drives professional advancement and personal satisfaction.
While high ambition is fundamental to success, the argument that it is an unequivocal requisite for career success and fulfilment invites closer scrutiny. An unbridled pursuit of success may undermine personal wellbeing and relationships besides predisposing individuals to ethical compromises and existential dissatisfaction. As Pyrrhus of Epirus discovered after the Pyrrhic War during the battles of Heraclea and Asculum in 280BC and 279BC respectively, a victory that inflicts such a devastating toll on the victor that it douses future aspirations, capability or progress is tantamount to defeat. To temper your ambition, consider and weigh what is at stake for you in the long term against the sacrifice you are prepared to offer on the altar of your dreams.
To broach the other issue you have raised, personal fulfilment is nuanced and idiosyncratic. Barring considerations of externally imposed benchmarks of career success, personal fulfilment largely tags at intrinsic motivations, values and the meaning individuals lend their lives. It encompasses different aspects for different individuals including, among others, wealth, personal wellbeing, growth, meaningful relationships, and altruistic endeavours. The answer to the question about whether you are fulfilled in life or not does not emerge externally, it largely emanates from your personal view and experience.
As you nurse your dreams and tease fulfilment from the substance of your endeavours, ponder over the words of H.P Lovecraft, from an excerpt of the poem ‘On The Vanity of Human Ambition’.
Apollo, chasing Daphne, gain'd his prize
But lo! she turn'd to wood before his eyes.
More modern swains at golden prizes aim,
And ever strive some worldly thing to claim.
Yet 'tis the same as in Apollo's case,
For, once attain'd, the purest gold seems base.
Fred Gituku is a HR practitioner
