“Ambition is a sin, purpose a gift.”

Only my wife and closest friends know that in the past year I went through a big transformation in my professional career as I quit a very stable job at Giorgio Armani and started my freelance journey. But why am I finding myself writing this post at 3am in the morning? I want to try to unfold the thinking that led me to this decision and hopefully provide useful food for thought to whoever might be going through the same process in life and is curious enough to read through this challenging article.

Why.

If there’s a seemingly simple yet important lesson I’ve learnt during my time working in big corporate organizations…

“If you want people to change, you need to give them a reason to”

If you find yourself at the airport and you start skipping the queue at security people might start staring down at you and probably voicing out some justified concerns, but if before moving you started informing the people ahead of the queue that you might be late for your flight most of them would probably let you through without hesitation.
When you manage complex transformational projects, you know you’ll have to brace for a range of Change Management challenges. But you can mitigate most of those drawbacks by simply making sure the company’s strategy is clear and employees understand why they’ve been asked to change the way they work.
My point is, “why” we do things matter, they matter to the people around us and matter for ourselves too.
I quit my job and started freelancing journey as Strategic Consultant and Executive Advisor out of a clear purpose but before we get there, there’s 4 important contradictions of modern work life that we need to go through as the four of them combined help explain the story.

The talent paradox. We move at the pace of the average.

There’s a feature that’s been available on cars for a while now called “Adaptive Cruise Control”. The technology allows for a driver to instruct the car to follow the cars ahead on the same line, which means it will automatically brake or accelerate based on the traffic. You just follow the stream. The same tends to happen in businesses when over-productive resources tend to reply to too many emails too quickly, deliver tasks too fast or put forward ideas too early. If the other departments aren’t as productive, quick or forward-thinking what normally happens is that the overactivity of the first category of people ends on a dead end, fails. So here’s where the problem resides in most cases.
Instead of the second category being incentivized to follow the example/pace of the more prolific colleagues, the failure of the previous activities drives the most productive part of the company to settle for a much more comfortable pace and match the one of the rest of the business. If you know anything about me, you know I love sports analogies. Training with people that are at a lower level of skills might be boring and demotivating, training with partners who have similar skills that ours often result in very slow improvements while sparring slightly better people might result in quicker skill development – anything that is hard enough to require exiting our comfort zones generally ends up improving us.

Now, this sociological behavior where productivity and talent seem to rebalance based on the average has a very relevant outcome for sake of this article: proactive and energetic resources who coercively slow down to the average pace might feel demotivated and leave once they find a more challenging project to buy into – usually a different company that, on paper, promises rewarding talent and energy.

The generation paradox. We work for different reasons.

I did touch upon this subject in detail on an ambitious blogpost titled “An anthropological perspective on the evolving role of HR and generally, how we work” (you can read it here if you feel daring!).

For most of history, work was primarily about survival. This came into sharp relief during the Industrial Era (late 18th through 19th centuries), though it was true for ages before that as well. In the industrial period, the majority of people labored out of sheer necessity.
To put food on the table, to keep a roof overhead.
If you time-traveled a typical 19th century factory worker into today’s world and asked, “Do you find your work fulfilling?”, you’d likely get a blank stare or a bitter laugh. Work was a means to an end – the end being not starving to death. Purpose in the lofty, self-actualizing sense wasn’t on the menu; purpose meant a day’s wage.

Fast-forward to the late 20th century: the rise of computers, information technology, and a globalized economy. We enter the Information Era, and the nature of work shifts from pure survival to aspiration. Now the narrative (especially in developed economies) became about “building a career,” “achieving success,” and other aspirational motifs. In this era, work is not just about feeding your family tonight; it’s about improving your standard of living, climbing the socioeconomic ladder, and attaining personal goals. If the Industrial Age worker asked “Will this job keep me alive and secure?”, the Information Age worker started asking “Will this job advance my career and let me afford a better life (and maybe that fancy new gadget called computer)?”

Enter the present day, what we might call the Social Era or the Digital Age of work. In this era, work is increasingly seen through the lens of meaning, fulfillment, and quality of life. This doesn’t mean money and aspiration are irrelevant (they aren’t, bills still exist!). But for many, especially younger professionals, the why of work has taken center stage.

The result is a generation (or two) of workers who ask, “What does my work mean in the grand scheme of things, and does it improve my life?” 
In the Social Era, a good job is one that offers flexibility, aligns with personal values, and leaves enough energy for life outside of work. Efficiency through technology is at an all-time high. We have powerful computers in our pockets and artificial intelligence at our fingertips. Routine tasks that used to consume hours (from crunching numbers to drafting basic reports) can now be done in minutes or automated entirely. Mental energy can be reallocated: instead of spending an afternoon digging up data, a manager can have an AI assistant (God bless Manus!) gather insights in seconds, freeing them to focus on creative strategy or, perhaps, to wrap up early and attend their kid’s football training…

At this point, we’ve traveled from a world where work was literally hunting wild animals to survive, through an age of factories and then cubicles, and now to an age of remote teamwork and AI co-workers. We’ve seen humans go from expending almost all their energy on basic survival tasks to using tiny fractions of their energy to achieve 10x the output, thanks to machines and computers. We’ve also seen motivations evolve from survival to ambition to self-fulfillment. So, what happens when the people have evolved but the institutions they work in have not?
Well, again, they leave for a more suitable environment.

The Ubiquity paradox. Where you are doesn’t matter, as long as you are present.

We’ve all experienced a little more modernity with the recent smart working policies adopted by brands during the covid pandemic but certain companies, especially in Italy, still require their employees to badge in and out even for lunch breaks! The goal is to make sure people spend at least 8h in the office. It’s like a toxic relationship, a mis-trust grounded in decades of bad blood between employees and companies. I’m sure you’ll agree one should earn based on the true value of his mind and work, not time spent in the office.

I’ve personally been criticized for badging out too early in some instances, but I’ve always refused to bow to the rule. In a world where performance can be tracked and value measured it seems crazy to think most employer-employee relationship is based on a clock.
Just as an example, in the last 12 months I worked in Versace I have set 0 out of offices, received an average of 3.2k emails/month and read them within 30 minutes in average, sent between 400 emails/month. Of course, almost 2/3 of my emails were managed well outside the canonical 8 working hours [18.00-09.00]. That year I was on time on 98% of the online meetings I attended and managed 12 projects that allowed the company to generate €50M (I talk about the Virtual Showroom project in Versace briefly here if you are interested) in revenue or on the other hand save €600.000/year (Digitalization of print placement).

The point is, you could spend 11 hours a day in the office or on call without adding any value or you can base someone’s scope of work on clear and measurable objectives and give AF about the time he spends in the office.

At most companies, policies and control processes are put in place to deal
with employees who exhibit sloppy, unprofessional, or irresponsible behavior (probably the same people that in the previous chapter lower the standards of the team). But if you build an organization made up of high performers, you can eliminate most
controls (check Netflix’s CEO “No rules rules” if you haven’t yet).
The denser the talent, the greater the freedom you can offer.

The ambition paradox. Ambition is a sin, purpose a gift.

“Your sin, Hercules, was that you had no ambition! I can deal with an ambitious man! He can be bought! But a man who wants nothing has no price!”

 King Eurystheus tortures Hercules

Side note. We recently started reading Greek mythology at night when we put to sleep our son Daniel and he is loving it. The ancient knowledge, the heroes journey and values portrayed in those stories preserve the potential to inspire even today.

Back to business, the above quote by King Eurystheus in the movie Hercules featuring the always huge Dwayne Jhonson reveals something profound about the nature of ambition that took me years to fully understand. The king could manipulate ambitious men because ambition, by its very nature, creates a price tag on a person’s soul. But a man driven by purpose rather than ambition? He becomes unpurchasable, uncontrollable, and ultimately, free.
The fourth paradox I encountered in corporate life wasn’t just about how organizations handle ambitious people. It was about discovering that ambition itself might be the problem.

Ambition, I came to realize, is inherently comparative. It requires others to be beneath you for you to be above them. It’s a zero-sum game where your success often necessitates someone else’s failure.
The ancient Stoics understood this distinction well. Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations, “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” He wasn’t advocating for mediocrity; he was pointing toward something deeper than ambition: the pursuit of virtue and purpose.

I witnessed this ambition trap countless times in corporate environments. Ambitious colleagues would step on others to climb the ladder, politicize every interaction, and lose sight of why they started their journey in the first place. They became so focused on winning that they forgot what they were actually trying to achieve. The means became the end, and the end became meaningless.

Aristotle distinguished between two types of desires in his Nicomachean Ethics: those that are instrumental (means to an end) and those that are intrinsic (ends in themselves). Ambition is almost always instrumental. We want the promotion, the title, the recognition as a means to something else: security, respect, validation. But purpose is intrinsic. It’s valuable in and of itself. The paradox reveals itself when you realize that the most ambitious people often become the most miserable ones. They achieve their goals only to discover that the achievement feels hollow.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, observed in “Man’s Search for Meaning” that those who survived the concentration camps weren’t necessarily the physically strongest, but those who had a clear sense of purpose. “Those who have a ‘why’ to live,” he wrote, quoting Nietzsche, “can bear with almost any ‘how.’”

The shift from ambition to purpose has transformed not just my work, but my entire approach to life. I no longer measure success by traditional metrics. I don’t dream of becoming a C-level executive or buying a fast car in a couple of years. Those ambitions feel foreign to me.

Instead, I find myself driven by simpler, more profound purposes: being present with my son, training my body and mind, working smarter rather than harder. The beautiful irony is that by letting go of traditional ambitions I found a new space where I’m working fewer hours than I used to, yet earning more than I ever did in corporate life. More importantly, I’m earning it on my own terms.

My freelance journey has taught me that when you stop chasing external validation and start following internal purpose, something magical happens: the work becomes its own reward. The relationships become more authentic. The days become more meaningful. I think about my son, and I realize that the greatest gift I can give him isn’t a successful father in the traditional sense, but a present one. A father who chose purpose over ambition, presence over prestige, and meaning over money. A father who understood that the real paradox isn’t that ambitious men can be bought, but that men of purpose don’t need to be sold at all.

In the end, this journey from corporate stability to freelance uncertainty wasn’t really about changing careers. It was about changing the fundamental question I ask myself each morning. Instead of “How can I get ahead today?” I now ask, “How can I be useful today?” And that simple shift has made all the difference.