In the spring of 1994, a reporter working for the newspaper where I was editor won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. It took your breath away. Imagine a reporter for a small newspaper in New Mexico winning the most coveted prize among the tens of thousands of reporters working for The New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.

So many honors and congratulations poured in. My wife arranged for us to go to dinner that night to celebrate with four of our closest friends. And as they relaxed over drinks and dinner, I was quiet as one thought kept running through my head:

“What’s next?”

The evening was sabotaged by an old “friend” who has been with me since I can remember: the hyper-achiever. I have a nickname for this pain-in-my-neck. I call him The Great One.

Hyper-achievers are never satisfied. They cannot enjoy moment. They do not accept validation because they are always thinking, as I did that night, “What’s next? Where is the next mountain to climb? What does my next job look like? How can I make more money? I am going to drive a better car than he does.”

It’s an awful way to live. Later in my life, it cost me my job. I had set ambitious goals for the newspaper where I was publisher and when I failed to meet them, the head of our division fired me. My wife asked me why I set the goals so high? I told her I wanted to beat every other publisher in the division and show that I was better than them.

(Now as it turned out, losing that job was the best thing that could have happened to me. The newspaper industry soon cratered, and I would have had to lay off about 75 percent of the more than 400 people on staff, most of whom I had hired.)

But the qualities of the hyper-achiever stayed with me for several more years until I learned about a program called Positive Intelligence that identifies your saboteurs and uses a calm, sage portion of your brain to corral them. I learned that if I continued to let the hyper-achiever rule my life, I would never be happy in my present circumstances, no matter how good they are. The hyper-achiever constantly asked me what do I do for an encore. It relies on the judgment of others to evaluate me.

I thought of The Great One this week when the San Fernando Valley Business Journal did me the honor of naming me as one the Valley’s top 200 most influential business leaders. I am grateful for the honor. But the old me would have asked, “How do I make it to the Los Angeles Business Journal business leader’s group?” The new me simply felt satisfied with the honor.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to climb higher and achieve more. Ambition is a good thing. But not when it prevents you from enjoying where you are right now.

If you have a saboteur in your life (and here is the list of the 10 of them), take the assessment and talk to me about the Positive Intelligence program.