Personal ambition is a hell of a thing. It can so easily morph from a strength into a weakness. From a weakness into a moral failing. And in leadership, that can be devastating. Because in leadership, there is a kind of resignation that arrives too late to be called noble.

At the time, it can look like sacrifice. The leader steps aside. The speech is gracious. The language is full of duty, service, renewal, the next generation, the future. Everyone exhales. The right thing has finally been done. But sometimes finally is the most important word in the sentence.

Because the question is not only whether a leader is willing to leave. The deeper question is whether they were willing to leave while there was still time for the thing they claimed to serve to recover without them.

There is a nice neatness to most leadership stories. They hit the usual beats. The one who refuses to quit. The one who believes when everyone else has lost faith. A person answers the call, crosses the threshold, faces the beast, suffers, survives, and returns victorious.

But in the hero’s journey, the point is not personal glory. The hero does not go into the underworld, slay the dragon, receive the gift, and then build a throne around their own legend. The journey is only complete when the hero returns to ordinary life carrying something that can renew the community. Without the return to community, the adventure becomes a prison. The victory becomes an identity, and the mission becomes inseparable from the person who once served it. This is where the hero starts to become the dragon.

The dragon is not always an enemy outside the gates. Sometimes it is the ego that cannot imagine a future in which it is no longer central. It is the part of us that only knows what has already happened, and therefore treats the unknown as a threat. In myth, the hero slays the dragon because, to complete the journey, they must undergo a kind of ego death.

The ego says: I am still the one. To be needed is intoxicating, and very human. To be the person everyone turns to. The one with the history, the scars, the authority. At first, it can feel like service. Often, it is service. Many leaders begin with a genuine burden. They step forward because something is broken, absent, neglected, or in danger.

And yes, sometimes they are exactly the person required for that season. The trouble begins when the season changes and they do not.

A founder who was perfect for the first wild years of a company may become the very person preventing it from maturing. A manager who rescued a failing team may later suffocate it with the same instincts that once saved it. A community leader who built an institution from nothing may find it unbearable when the institution no longer needs their hand on every decision.

The leader begins to confuse the cause with their own continued importance. They call it loyalty. They call it unfinished work. They call it responsibility. They say the timing is not right, the successor is not ready, the stakes are too high, the enemies are too dangerous, the work is too fragile. And perhaps some of that is true.

But there is a difference between persistence and obstinacy. The persistent leader remains attached to the purpose. The obstinate leader becomes attached to the role and their methods. Paul Graham wrote a very good essay about this here.

That distinction can be almost impossible to see from the inside. By the time a person has spent years becoming the answer to a problem, their sense of self may have fused with the answer. To leave the role then feels less like succession and more like death.

We talk a lot about courage in leadership. Usually, we mean the courage to begin. To launch the thing. To take the risk. To make the unpopular decision. To keep going when the crowd turns. But there is another kind of courage, less cinematic and more spiritually demanding. The courage to become unnecessary.

The ancient Romans had a story about this.

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was said to be living on his farm when Rome called on him during a military emergency. He was appointed dictator and given extraordinary power at a moment of crisis. He led Rome to victory, then gave the power back and returned to his fields.

Like many ancient stories, it is probably part history and part civic myth. But myths reveal what a culture wants to remember. Rome told itself the story of Cincinnatus because it needed an image of power that did not cling to itself. The most important part of the story is not that Cincinnatus took command. It is that he went home.

George Washington was deeply inspired by Cincinnatus and understood the force of that image. After the American Revolutionary War, he resigned his commission rather than turn military victory into personal rule. Later, after two terms as president, he left again. In doing so, he made a decision that seems almost unnatural in the long history of power. He refused to become indispensable.

Anyone can say they serve the republic, the company, the mission, the team, the movement. The test comes when service asks you to surrender the part of it that made you feel most alive.

To step aside from something you have built, protected, or loved is not a neat moral gesture. It can feel like exile. But if the house can only stand while you are inside it, perhaps you did not build a house. Perhaps you built a shrine to yourself.

The final test of leadership is not whether you can hold power, but whether you can give it back before the mission becomes your mirror, before continuity becomes control, before wisdom becomes obstruction, before the hero becomes the dragon.

NEW PODCAST ALERT

In this episode, of the Finding Meaning in Work Podcast, I speak with Suji Sanjeevan, the co founder of BrandScent and Light and Glow

We talked about…

About Suji

Suji Sanjeevan is a fragrance innovator, entrepreneur and co founder of Light and Glo and BrandScent, where science, psychology and storytelling collide to create brands people genuinely remember. With a clinical background and an instinct for consumer behaviour, she has built businesses that challenge the traditional idea of fragrance, transforming scent from a product into a strategic brand tool.

What began at a dining table evolved into national retail, global conversations and partnerships spanning retail, sport, hospitality and corporate. From boardrooms to stadiums, Suji’s work sits at the intersection of emotion, memory and experience, proving that the most powerful brands are not always the loudest, they are the ones people feel.

Alongside entrepreneurship, Suji serves as Chair of the Victorian Small Business Ministerial Council, advocating for founders and the realities of modern business. She is passionate about helping early stage businesses think bigger, refine faster and build brands with real cut through