>Maybe he was happy-as-a-clam there but spending your entire adult life having (seemingly) never taken a risk.
If he was able to climb the ladder to become the CEO, he probably took some very big risks and had a very big target on his back. The risks are just different from moving from one company to another.
I've worked at different large companies and met plenty of people who only did exactly what was asked for them. They barely took any risks. Every few years they got a standard promotion as per HR policy, but ultimately their career trajectory stalled. There's nothing wrong with that, but somebody who can climb to be a CEO of a company like Intel surely took some risks and did something to stand out?
He joined out of school then climbed to CEO. That's damned impressive.
It would take commitment, grit, skill, and so much more to do that. It's not like he was a mindless pencil pusher in the same dead-end job his whole life.
I hope to work at the same company for the rest of my life, raise my kids, vacation regularly with my wife, then die. I would be completely content with a 'boring' life.
I'm the same. Take risks? No thanks. Give me boring any day. The last time we took the kids to Disneyland I realized that I'm more of a Jungle Cruise kind of guy than that Indiana Jones ride.
Many philosophers thought so, but there are other pursuits. The philosophy of virtue (not in the biblical sense) describes one such alternative. The teachings of the virtue ethics can be perceived to mean that your pursuit should be mastery of any one (or number) of subject(s) and/or character traits. Mastery would be the perfect marriage between effort, preparation and result (or in the case of ethics, the perfect life in balance, cultivating the good in you).
There are as many reasons to do things as there are people do do them ;)
Happiness was simply a proxy for whatever your intrinsic goals in life are; unless risk itself is your intrinsic goal, the goal itself doesn't change my argument.
Intel has made some risky moves and bad bets since he became an executive (1990?), and even further back when he was hired. Pentium 4, XScale, and Itanium come to my mind.
Intel hasn't been a tiny start up for decades. You can do many different things inside a large company that is in so many markets. Just because someone stays at the same company for their entire career doesn't mean that they were riding the gravy train the entire time.
You're hitting the nail on the head here. When I interned at Intel, they constantly said that even if you aren't happy in your current role once you are full time, you can always transfer teams and do something wildly different since the company is so large. So you can effectively 'job hop', but within the same company.
The idea of (seemingly) having never explored other places. He graduated and immediately joined Intel and never left.
Maybe he was happy-as-a-clam there but spending your entire adult life having (seemingly) never taken a risk.
There is obviously a lot of assumption and judgement to this though.