When it comes to defining career success, “should” often replaces “want to” in our internal monologues. A manager in his 30’s described his job to me as fulfilling, but admitted: “Sometimes I worry that I haven’t moved far enough. When I look at my business school classmates, some of them are running companies. I think, I should be doing that by now. I wonder what’s wrong with me.”

That’s the language of ambition, which can be a wonderful
motivator or a terrible taskmaster. When you hear about a friend’s great new job, a little voice inside your head may be saying, “I should be looking around, too, or I’ll miss out.” How can you know if these thoughts represent realistic goals, misplaced ambition or just envy?

1. Put “want to” back into your thinking.
Ignore what everyone else is doing. What kind of work for what kind of boss in what kind of organization will make you happy? Job title, salary and formal authority are only some ways to define whether you have “made it.” For some people, those mean more than any other measurement. However, for others, being known as a good teacher or mentor, or a really strong programmer, is just as fulfilling as getting a seat on the executive committee. Do you want to—in fact, do you crave to—be a honcho because you think it would be extremely satisfying? Do you truly want to work in a start-up environment? If you can’t answer those questions for yourself, you surely can’t answer them to the satisfaction of an executive recruiter or senior leader who’s looking to fill a key vacancy.

2. Know what you will sacrifice if you make a move.
A colleague was discussing ambition with me recently and said, “There are two kinds of jobs: King Arthur and Merlin. It might be great to be king, but there’s a lot of pressure that goes with leading the Round Table. I’d rather be Merlin and not have all the headaches.” I recently heard a very successful mid-level manager talk about his decision to get off the fast track to a general manager’s job, because he knew that to succeed, he would have to sacrifice his relationship with his family. You can’t rise to the top, or even near it, without taking on a lot more workload and pressure.

When that happens, something has to give. Are you willing to make the tradeoff? Take a look at the “whole life” picture before letting your ambition run away with you.

3. Check to see if that greener grass is really artificial turf.
Early in my career, I could be fairly accused of changing jobs because I thought the grass would be greener in my next stop. Sometimes it was, but often I let ambition cloud my judgment. It’s easy to think that if you just switched companies, you wouldn’t have to deal with an overbearing manager. Trust me, there are more than enough of those bozos to go around, so sooner or later you’ll meet another. It may seem that earning a lot more money would make up for a lot of stress, but that’s not true for everyone.

4. Find the excitement factor.
Think ahead a few months. If you decide to concentrate on getting more responsibility in your organization, or to listen to the blandishments of a headhunter, are you going to be excited about going to work every day? Excitement can take many forms, from learning about a new industry to flexing your muscles as a leader, to accumulating enough money to have the freedom to do things you’ve always dreamed of.

What’s important is that you can get jazzed about what you’re doing. If you can’t, you have listened too closely to your little “should” voice.

First published in John Epperheimer’s “Careers” column, which appears every other Thursday in the Business section of the San Jose Mercury News. He is President of the Workpath Group.