The Hierarchies We Never Question
On ambition, identity, and the difference between being admired and being loved.
A friend of mine and I were talking recently about something that feels completely ordinary in the Bay Area until you spend time somewhere else.
We both work in leadership development, and we couldn't help laughing at how much identity gets wrapped up in where we work. Years ago, it was the Cal Berkeley sweatshirt. Today it's the Google backpack, the Meta hoodie, the startup T-shirt, or the company logo quietly stitched onto a jacket. Titles have become part of the introduction. "I'm a VP." "I'm a founder." "I lead this team."
No one says these things make someone more important.
They don't have to.
The culture teaches us.
None of this is a criticism of ambition. I believe in meaningful work. I admire people who devote themselves to mastering a craft, building organizations, solving difficult problems, and creating opportunities for others.
What I've been questioning isn't achievement.
It's identity.
At what point do our accomplishments stop becoming something we've done and begin becoming the way we evaluate ourselves and everyone around us?
There is a confidence that can only be earned.
I've walked into rooms knowing I belonged there. Not because someone told me I did, but because I had done the work, lived the failures, and arrived with something real to offer. As a woman and a minority, that walk sometimes requires a particular kind of intentionality. You don't always receive the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes you have to carry your own certainty into the room.
That's not elitism.
That's self-possession.
Elitism is what happens when confidence becomes exclusion. When knowing your worth becomes deciding someone else's is somehow less. When the room you fought to enter becomes a room you forget to hold open.
Sometimes it's more subtle than that. It's the first question that forms in your mind when you meet someone. Not "Who are you?" but "Where did you go to school?" "Which companies have you worked for?" "How many languages do you speak?" Even when you don't have those credentials yourself. Especially then.
Aspiring to a hierarchy you haven't entered is still a hierarchy.
Travel has a way of disrupting those assumptions.
In some parts of the country, your neighbors might live next door for months before asking what you do for a living. In many places around the world, people are far more interested in whether you're generous, dependable, or enjoyable to be around than they are in your LinkedIn headline.
When I was on holiday in Ravello, Italy, I realized people flexed differently.
The flex wasn't your career.
It was how long you'd been together.
It was whose family had been making the best limoncello for generations.
It was the excitement of introducing you to their partner, the person they'd built a life with and insisting you come back for dinner the next time you were in town.
I heard it from the cab driver just as naturally as I heard it from the owner of a small boutique I befriended. There was a quiet pride in long-term love and partnership, family traditions, hospitality, and lives intentionally built around one another.
For a while, I forgot to ask people what they did for a living.
I became much more interested in how they lived.
The symbols change because cultures change. Which makes you wonder how much status is simply an agreement a community makes with itself.
History has always organized societies into hierarchies. Built around birth, wealth, family name, religion, or political power. Today we've created newer versions. We rank one another by employers, universities, compensation, neighborhoods, followers, and proximity to success.
The categories evolve.
The instinct remains remarkably familiar.
What's interesting is how quickly these invisible hierarchies begin shaping our decisions.
We work longer hours than we intended. We accept promotions we aren't sure we even want. We let distance grow, in miles and in moments, believing we'll make it all up later.
Sometimes later never arrives.
Organizations continue without us. Someone eventually fills the role. The people we love cannot simply be replaced.
The relationships we neglected don't automatically return.
The partner who spent years receiving only the exhausted version of us doesn't get those years back.
The children who grew up while we were answering one more email don't become young again.
I've attended enough memorials to notice what people remember.
They don't remember quarterly targets.
They don't remember organizational charts.
They don't remember how many people reported to someone.
They remember moments.
When I delivered the eulogy for someone I loved, I realized none of the accomplishments I thought I might mention were the ones that mattered most.
I spoke about her resilience.
I spoke about the remarkable number of times she reinvented herself. It felt as though she had lived several incarnations in a single lifetime, each one requiring the courage to release an old identity and begin again.
I spoke about how brave she was, even when she was afraid. How unapologetically she chose her own path despite misunderstanding, criticism, and uncertainty. I spoke about the way she gave other people permission to become more fully themselves simply by refusing to abandon who she was.
Those were the stories that stayed with people.
Something else stayed with me that day.
Like many of us, she had spent years hoping to earn the respect of influential people. She admired them. She wanted to belong in those circles. She believed, as many of us do, that acceptance from the right people would somehow validate the life she had built.
Most of those people never came.
The room was filled with people who had loved her across chapters. Some had been romantic loves once. Others had been friends through the worst of it. All of them had stayed in some form, departed in some way, but they filled the room because she had been worth returning for.
They weren't there because of her résumé. They were there because of who she had been in their lives.
That day reminded me that there is a difference between being admired and being loved.
One fills a résumé.
The other fills a room.
Perhaps the most important decisions we make aren't about which ladder we climb.
Perhaps they're about whether the climb slowly costs us the very partnership we prayed for and the people we hoped would still be waiting when we reached the top.
One day, every title we've ever held will belong to someone else.
The people who loved us won't remember the org chart.
They'll remember our courage. They'll remember our kindness. They'll remember whether we showed up. They'll remember whether we loved well.
One fills a résumé. The other fills a room.
