You Can See Everything, the new documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, is riveting. You can’t help but get sucked into the orbit of Holmes, the fraudulent founder of Theranos, who is currently serving 11 years in a Texas federal prison called Camp Bryan.
At the heart of the film is a simple, crucial, and timely lesson: ambition is not an excuse to be a sociopath. Be wary of people driven primarily by status and power. They will do terrible things and try to convince you, and even themselves, it was fine.
Holmes is an extreme case, but her story is a tale as old as time. Success begets expectations, and if those expectations aren’t met, it’s easy to compromise your integrity.
Don’t do this.
An instructive concept is what researchers call obsessive passion: it’s when you begin to love the fame, fortune, power, and status you get from your work more than the integrity of the work itself.
Study after study shows obsessive passion is linked to burnout, anxiety, depression, delusion, and absurd levels of fraud—whether it’s a founder lying about her company’s product, an athlete cheating with performance enhancing drugs, or a politician making a deal with the devil.
It’s easy to say “examples like Holmes are so out there” but you see the same story unfold on social media and even here on substack, albeit on a smaller scale, all the time.
Everyone wants to grow their audience, their product, their business—myself included. But if growth and ego are higher values than “honesty,” “integrity,” or “craft,” then you end up going down grifter highway. You don’t need to look far for examples. It’s the biggest reason so many podcast hosts and writers begin peddling in conspiracies, flimsy provocative takes, and cheap lies.
Growing an audience or business is a fine goal, but when being a relentless marketer who is comfortable with lying overpowers quality and craft, you get the enshittification of everything.
You can argue that “it’s the system” or “consumerism” or even capitalism as a whole, but I think this is a cop out because you still have some choice. For all the sociopaths out there, there are still countless people who do things the right way, who pursue excellence not just as an outcome but as a process and virtue.
Making money, growing an audience, and gaining status are normal human urges. Trying to pretend they aren’t is a fool’s errand, its own kind of delusion. But you can acknowledge these urges and then ensure you have other, firmer values that sit above them, and support the work of people who do the same.
The moral order of the universe depends on it.
Obsessive passion, yes. So many founders start out loving the work and slowly start loving the numbers more, and the anxiety comes right along with it. Great piece, Brad.
Brad, I think you’ve identified something more consequential than the familiar warning about ambition. The real danger begins when the rewards of achievement gradually replace the reasons we pursued the work in the first place.
What makes this especially troubling is that the transition rarely happens all at once. It happens through small accommodations, each defensible in isolation, until the person can no longer distinguish protecting the work from protecting their own status.
I’d add one nuance to your point about the system. Individual choice absolutely matters, but we also build institutions and cultures that reward the very behavior we later condemn. When visibility becomes a proxy for credibility, growth for quality, and winning for character, we shouldn’t be surprised when people optimize for the wrong things.
Perhaps the harder question isn’t simply whether we can succeed without compromising our values, but whether we can recognize when success itself has begun changing those values.
Achievement tells us what we’ve accomplished. It tells us considerably less about who we’ve become in the process.
Excellent and timely piece.