[precompute]

That's a great response.

A career (and life) trajectory of the sorts that you described is ideal for people that don't much care about their social standing in terms of what is "expected" of them. As in you wouldn't expect those people to be head girls, they wouldn't much care about what was expected of them. The primary impetus for most success is ego and envy, and almost never bragging rights. The people who do things BECAUSE those things happen to be the best they could do are vanishingly rare.

Someone like Alex Honnold would fare very poorly in an office environment, and would get chewed up by the sociopaths-in-charge, and the regular office drone monotony would not respond well to someone like him joining a clique / group / "being the [X] guy"

There are many organizational explanations for this, but one that's sort of easy to understand without much background (ie sans MBTI / ways people respond to culture/novel things / esoteric woo / etc) is https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Most "ambitious" people care about their careers because they aren't properly ambitious in the first place.

[brailsafe]

Yes, I agree with every point you made and I'm glad you liked my extremely long reply :) It was a somewhat tricky thing to articulate while also not dismissing the merit of having career ambitions as their own useful thing.