How do you measure a career?

I was talking to an experienced manager (E7+) and mentioned how I wanted to get to tech lead/manager much faster than the expected timeline at my company. They asked me why I wanted to get promoted faster and I was confused by that question. Promotion and climbing the ladder just seems like the natural thing to work towards as a new grad, so I was taken aback. I ultimately said “you get more money, you have more impact, it looks better on your resume, so why wouldn’t you do it?”.

He then advised me that promotion shouldn’t be the means to an end and advised me to focus on growth as an engineer and the promotions will come. They’ve seen people who burn out after several years even if their career looks great from the outside.

I’ve always thought career success = seniority+brand+TC and this model seems to fit pretty well if you look at people (non-founders) who are successful. So when this manager suggested to not focus on promotions, that effectively gets rid of the level/TC portion of the equation. So if not TC or seniority, then what is the KPI that makes a career successful? How do you measure career progression?

The manager’s advice reminded me of Alex’s video on balancing growth and promo. The video gives me the impression that promo-obsessed people are toxic, but I don’t see how there’s some inherent tradeoff between being a good person and being obsessed with promotion? Can’t you be a good human being and be promo hungry? A huge focus of Taro and other career growth resources is getting promoted fast, so why shouldn’t we be focused on accelerating promotion timelines?