I’ve always cared too much about impressing people. That part isn’t new. What surprises me now, at 65, is that it got worse in my 40s, not my 20s.
I’d been named senior VP at a company most people in the industry had heard of. I was in rooms I’d spent years trying to get into. People knew my name before I introduced myself. Invitations started showing up. People wanted lunch. People wanted my opinion. People who had barely noticed me five years earlier had a lot to say.
At the time, I thought all that attention meant I had finally become impressive. Looking back at 65, sitting in a much quieter house with a much quieter phone, I think I confused being watched with being valued.
I liked being somebody whose presence mattered
I was working constantly and doing well enough that the work kept rewarding me for it. I had the title, the expense account, the hotel upgrades, the people waiting for me before meetings started. I’d walk into a restaurant, and someone already had a table. My phone was always going.
There were dinners, events, introductions. People saying you have to meet so-and-so. I liked it more than I admitted. I started dressing a little better, ordering the better bottle, saying yes to things I didn’t even want to attend because I liked being someone whose presence seemed to matter.
I’d get ready for a Saturday dinner I had no interest in and tell my wife I was building relationships. Six people I barely knew, talking about a deal I wasn’t part of, and I sat there smiling because being at the table felt like proof I belonged.
My wife said once that I came home from those dinners more tired than when I left. I told her she didn’t understand the business. She didn’t bring it up again.
I thought I was networking. A lot of the time, I was performing success for an audience I desperately wanted to keep.
There’s a version of self-worth that only holds up as long as people are watching you succeed, and I was running on it without knowing the name for it. Every dinner, every introduction, every raised glass was proof that I’d made it. I needed the proof the way other people need coffee. Daily, and in public.
Some of them were impressed by access
One person always had a quick favor after lunch. Nothing major. A call to a hiring manager about their nephew. A mention of their consulting firm at a dinner where the right people were sitting. At the time, I told myself that’s how professional friendships work. People help each other.
Somebody else became a close friend right around the time they needed an introduction to someone in my industry. The friendship was warm, attentive, full of lunches I didn’t have to organize. It cooled down about six weeks after the introduction was made. I didn’t connect those two facts for almost a year.
There were people who loved hearing about the job, the deals, the trips, the people I knew. They asked great questions. They leaned in. But the second the conversation turned ordinary, my daughter’s soccer schedule or the book I was reading, the interest faded.
My life was interesting to them only in the parts where it overlapped with theirs.
I didn’t catch any of that at the time because flattery feels very sincere when it arrives right after you’ve spent years wanting recognition. I thought people admired me. Some of them were impressed by proximity.
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I didn’t investigate the motive because I didn’t want to
Nobody walks up and says I’m being extra nice because I think you can help me. They laugh at your jokes. They remember your birthday. They invite you somewhere expensive. They tell you how smart your last move was, and they say it with enough specificity that it feels personal.
When you’re already hungry to prove yourself, you don’t question the attention. You feel lucky to be wanted. You let the warmth in without checking where it’s coming from, because checking might ruin it, and the warmth is the whole point.
I can see now that I was so grateful to finally be in the room that I never stopped to ask why everyone in it was being so generous. The simplest answer, that I was likable, was the one I wanted. The more complicated answer, that some of them found me useful, was the one I wasn’t ready to hear.
That’s the part I wish I’d understood at 40. Attention can feel almost identical whether it comes from affection, admiration, ambition, or convenience. Tying your worth to proof means the proof never stops being necessary, and the people providing it get to set the terms. You end up needing approval from people you never chose.
You usually find out which kind of attention it was when you stop being useful.
Then the title changed
I took the early package at 58. Somebody younger got the office, the phone calls, the invitations. The spotlight didn’t go out. It moved, the way it always does, to the next person who had what the room needed.
And then things quietly clarified themselves.
A few people are still there. My college roommate. A woman I worked with fifteen years ago who left the industry entirely. A neighbor who has no connection to my career at all.
They ask how my wife is doing. They remember my son’s name. They call without needing an introduction, a recommendation, or a seat at somebody else’s table. They call on a Saturday because they drove past the restaurant we used to go to and thought of me.
My college roommate drove four hours when my wife had surgery. He slept on the couch and left Monday morning. He never asked for a favor once.
Others vanished so cleanly it was almost funny. The phone stopped ringing from numbers I’d saved as important. The lunches dried up. The dinners stopped being proposed. The people who used to find me fascinating found someone else to find fascinating, and the transition took about a month.
At first, that bothered me more than I expected. I was discarded, which is a strange thing to realize when the people who left were the ones you’d spent the most money entertaining. Then it became the most useful information I’d gotten in twenty years.
I finally got to see the difference between people who were drawn to my life and people who liked me. The first group was bigger. The second group was better. And the second group had been there the whole time, waiting patiently through the years I was too busy performing for strangers to notice them.
Ambition wasn’t the problem
I don’t regret the career. I don’t regret wanting it or working for it or enjoying the years when everything was clicking. Some of those work relationships were real, and some people who wanted access also cared about me. Both things lived in the same room.
Adult relationships are rarely pure. We help each other. We open doors. We trade favors and make introductions, and sometimes the kindness and the strategy are the same gesture. I’m not going to pretend I never benefited from the same dynamic I’m describing. I called people because I needed things too.
What I’d warn my 40-year-old self about isn’t ambition. It’s using other people’s attention as proof that I was enough. Because when the attention is the evidence, you never stop needing more of it, and you can never quite tell who’s providing it for free.
I wouldn’t tell my younger self to slow down. He wouldn’t have listened anyway. I wouldn’t tell him to enjoy it more, because he was enjoying it, and that wasn’t the problem.
I’d tell him to pay attention to who stays interested when there’s nothing impressive happening. Who still calls when the job title changes. Who asks a question they can’t benefit from the answer to. Who shows up at the hospital, at the funeral, at the boring Wednesday dinner when there’s nothing to gain from being there.
Those are the people worth impressing the least, because they were never waiting to be impressed in the first place.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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