What engineering leaders can learn from stoicism

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”

Marcus Aurelius wrote that almost two thousand years ago, in a private journal he never intended anyone to read. Coming from a man who held every title Rome could give, it’s a telling way to measure worth: not by what you hold, but by what you aim at. It has stuck with me, because everything I’ve seen in my career backs it up. Deep technical knowledge is where great engineering starts. But it has never been the thing that sets the most impactful engineers apart.

I was 12 when I started pen testing. Not for a class, not because anyone suggested it. It came out of pure curiosity about how things worked. Most of what I did failed, and that turned out to be the whole education. Five years later I had built my first startup, not because the skills came fast, but because I couldn’t leave the problems alone. Whatever that quality is, I’ve spent my career trying to name it, hire for it, and build teams around it.

The Stoics identified it a long time ago. Three of their ideas hold up remarkably well inside an engineering org.

Your worth is your ambitions, not your knowledge

Engineering skills help you solve today’s problems, but ambition pushes you toward the problems no one has solved yet. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t measuring people by what they knew (Rome had plenty of educated men), he measured them by what they aimed at.

It’s the same in present day: I’ve worked with people who knew more than everyone else in the room and still made less impact, because knowing is not the same as being determined to make what you know matter. Skills can be taught, practiced, and refined. That’s exactly what makes them table stakes. When I evaluate an engineer, the technical interview tells me what they can do today. What they’re aiming at tells me what they’ll be capable of in three years. In this industry, three years is a lifetime.

Aim at problems, not applause

Here’s the twist: Marcus Aurelius was actually suspicious of ambition. His definition of it was tying your well-being to what other people say about you. Sanity, he said, was tying it to your own actions.

It might on the surface seem like a contradiction, but I’d argue it’s the most useful distinction a leader can make. From my viewpoint, there are two kinds of ambitious engineers: one is aimed at titles, visibility, being seen as the smartest person in the room. The other is aimed at problems. The first kind burns out or burns the team, and the second compounds into favorable business outcomes. The best engineers I’ve worked with wanted hard problems more than they wanted promotions, and they usually ended up with both. When I say hire for ambition, I mean the second kind, and Marcus Aurelius would have backed me up.

Control what you can, which is not the technology

The Stoics built everything on one move: separate what you control from what you don’t. You don’t control the market, other people, or luck. You control your judgment and your effort.

An engineer controls even less than they’d like. Every framework I mastered a decade ago is mostly irrelevant now. The AI tools rewriting our field today will look primitive in five years. Nobody gets a vote on that. If your value is only what you know, your value is always declining, and no amount of worry changes the depreciation schedule.

What you do control is whether you keep learning when the answer isn’t obvious and keep building when the path isn’t certain. That’s the part that compounds. The engineer who has it gets stronger every time the industry shifts, because change stops being a threat and becomes an opening.

What this means on a real team

Unfortunately, you can’t send someone to a bootcamp for ambition, but you can build a place where it grows. Give people real problems to solve and reward the one who asks, “what if,” not just the one who checks the box. Make it safe to attempt something hard and miss—and even “fail.” And finally, watch what people poke at when nobody assigned it, because that tells you more about their trajectory than any certification.

Above all, pay attention to comfort, because comfort is where ambition goes to die. In my experience, discomfort and ambition are directly related. Growth only happens when you’re uncomfortable, and ambitious people know it, which is why they keep reaching for the problems that are slightly beyond them. The Stoics understood this too. Seneca deliberately practiced discomfort so it would never control him. If you and your team feel completely comfortable, that’s a sign nobody is reaching.

The strongest engineers aren’t simply the ones who know the most. They’re the ones determined to make what they know matter. A Roman emperor figured that out while running the ancient world’s largest organization. It still holds in ours.