My ghost hangs out in a recycling bin. In my small family—mom, sister, me—one of my nicknames was “Toter woman.” The Toter was our large blue recycling bin on wheels. I carried it up our hilly driveway every week, without fail. There was no dad or brother to do it. I was competent and strong. I did things myself; I was the eldest daughter of a single mother. Who needed a man around? Toter woman is a well-meaning family ghost. She’s powerful, but also exhausting because she always has to know the answer, do the right thing, and step up. I battle her every day.
Do you bring ghosts to work? Probably. Family ghosts are the fundamental attitudes and behaviors that evolved from your family of origin and follow you into the present. We grow up playing roles in our families; we repeat those roles as adults and sometimes build entire careers around them. And if our ghosts are keeping us stuck in unhelpful patterns, we can exorcise them.
In a classic Harvard Business Review article, MIT Professor Deborah Ancona, collaborating with Dennis NT Perkins, says the first step is identifying your ghosts. Our ghosts play a huge role in what motivates us, and so we need to understand them. I wrote about the power of understanding what really motivates you in my last column, when I introduced TAAM, my framework for the four forces—Time, Attention, Agency, and Motivation—that shape how we actually function at work.
What family ghost drives your motivation?
Of the four, Motivation is the one most influenced by family ghosts. Not because we don’t know what motivates us; most of us could rattle off an answer if you asked. The problem is that the answer we give is usually about external forces we’ve become habituated to: deadlines, praise, fear, keeping the peace, winning a competition. What we rarely examine is why that particular fuel works on us, why it motivates us, and if it’s healthy for us.
Tech executive Andy Johns learned this the hard way, and it nearly cost him everything before it saved him.
I interviewed Andy for my podcast The Anxious Achiever in 2022, and his story sticks with me today. Andy spent close to two decades at the center of Silicon Valley’s growth machine, with jobs on early teams at Facebook, Wealthfront, and Quora, executive and advisory roles with ten multi-billion-dollar startups. By every external measure, he was one of the most successful people in tech. He was also, by his own account, falling apart.
The first panic attack hit on a train into San Francisco, on his way to work at Twitter. Vivid, violent intrusive thoughts arrived with no warning and no obvious trigger. He made it to his desk, sat through the panic until he couldn’t anymore, then walked out, got back on the train, and cried the whole way home. He didn’t tell anyone. He just kept going.
What Andy didn’t understand yet—and wouldn’t for years—was where that panic was coming from, or why he’d spent his entire adult life chasing achievement with something close to desperation.
The truth, when he finally excavated it, was rooted in his childhood. He grew up in a volatile household; his mother struggled with serious mental illness and died when he was ten, the family going bankrupt paying her medical bills. Amid the instability, Andy found one reliable way to feel okay: achievement. Every blue ribbon, every trophy, every home run, every A, he told me, meant proof that he was good, that he was lovable at a time when he didn’t otherwise feel that way. He put it to me this way: achiever Andy equals loved; unachieving Andy equals unlovable. Quite a ghost.
That equation didn’t stay in his childhood. It became the operating logic of his entire career. The drive that built his reputation as one of the sharpest growth minds in tech wasn’t ambition in the way we usually talk about it at work. It was a coping mechanism that happened to be extraordinarily good at producing results—right up until his nervous system, running in a state of high alert since childhood, started sending unmistakable signals that it couldn’t keep going.
Can you relate?
Here’s what makes Andy’s story more than a cautionary tale about burnout: he eventually did something most high achievers never do. He turned inward, instead of doubling down on the achievement that had always numbed the pain. Therapy, self-inquiry, what he calls “internal engineering,” years of deliberately rewriting the belief that his worth was conditional on his output. And as that belief loosened its grip, something he hadn’t expected happened: his drive to achieve started to loosen too.
Andy described a tension to me that he hears constantly from other high performers: a fear that if they actually do the internal work and they stop running from whatever they’re running from, their drive will evaporate, and their success along with it. As if achievement and self-acceptance are locked in some zero-sum trade.
For Andy, it wasn’t zero-sum, but it also wasn’t free. When he finally felt like enough, independent of his next win, he walked away from a career on track to pay him seven figures a year—at its peak—because staying would have meant continuing to prove something to himself that no longer needed proving.
This isn’t an argument against ambition, or a suggestion that drive is inherently a red flag. Plenty of people are motivated by challenge, curiosity, meaning, or the simple pleasure of doing something well, with no childhood wound underneath it. Plenty of us are motivated by money, myself included. The point isn’t that achievement is suspect. It’s that achievement can mask itself as motivation when it’s actually something closer to anesthesia—and the only way to know the difference is to ask.
Giving up the ghost
Ancona’s framework helps here. She’s coached plenty of executives carrying what she calls the Never Good Enough ghost: enough is never enough, you have to keep maxing out, you have to be number one. Or its close cousin, which is the belief that you are not enough as you are, that you have to keep proving yourself through achievement no matter how much you’ve already accomplished. “These are perhaps your anxious achievers,” Ancona told me.
What I find most useful about the ghost concept is that it’s not pathologizing. Ancona is quick to point out there’s no shame in having ghosts, because everyone does. The goal isn’t to exorcise ambition. It’s to get specific enough about where your drive comes from that you can finally tell the difference between the part that’s genuinely yours, and the part that’s still trying to win an argument with someone from decades ago.
So here’s the question I’d add to your TAAM profile, under Motivation: when you succeed, what do you actually feel? Relief? Joy? A brief window where the noise in your head goes quiet? And when you imagine not achieving—taking your foot off the gas, missing the target, being merely fine instead of impressive—what comes up? Do you hear a voice from your past? If the answer edges toward shame, or a sense that you’d be exposed as fundamentally lacking, that’s worth sitting with. Not because something is wrong with you, but because your motivation isn’t only about the goal in front of you. It’s about an old story still running in the background.
Andy’s advice is to seek the truth about who you actually are, underneath the performance. Be willing to change old patterns. Therapy, journaling, meditation—the method matters less than the willingness to look. The answer, he told me, is never outside you. It’s always inside.
As for me, Toter woman is always going to be a piece of me. I love her. But I also love the freedom to let other people take charge, to not know the answer, and to sit one out. I’ve only recently been able to embrace this freedom, and it came from a lot of self-enquiry and hard inner work.
Try this: Think of the last time you achieved something significant at work—a promotion, a deal closed, a project that landed well. Notice what you felt in that moment, as specifically as you can. Then ask: was that feeling about the work itself, or about what the achievement proved about you? There’s no wrong answer. But the honest one is worth knowing, because it’s the difference between motivation that fuels you and motivation that might be from a ghost and ready to discard.
