It's difficult to spend meaningful time at a place like Stanford without absorbing the implicit message that success is the measure of a person. The metrics are familiar: academic excellence, prestigious internships, influential networks, venture capital funding, thought leadership. Even those who resist this current often do so by redefining success, rarely rejecting the premise that our own worth is tied to accomplishment.
That's why Patrick Gelsinger's conversation for the Chi Alpha Christian fellowship left a lasting impression. Chi Alpha is one of Stanford's largest and most diverse Christian organizations and focuses on building authentic community, exploring faith and applying it to students' everyday lives. The fellowship is led by Glen and Paula Davis, two pastors who care deeply about creating a space where students can wrestle with life's biggest questions and find God in the process. Usually, one of them preaches. But on one Wednesday in February, they welcomed Gelsinger -- the former CEO of Intel, key contributor to the development of USB and WiFi and a respected figure in the tech world -- for an interview-style conversation moderated by Glen Davis.
At first, hearing Gelsinger speak at a college Christian group might came as a surprise. But in a place like Stanford, where ambition often defines identity, he was exactly the voice we needed.
Stanford students are some of the most capable in the world. We work long hours, build impressive resumes and aim for the most competitive jobs. Many of us -- whether we realize it or not -- tie our value to what we achieve. We wear duck syndrome like a badge; we're smooth and composed on the surface but paddling furiously underneath, afraid to admit when we didn't get the grade, internship or outcome we hoped for.
Gelsinger has lived an aspirational life of technical brilliance, professional power and prestige. And yet, his core message was this: don't let your accomplishments define you.
What made his words so powerful wasn't just that they were wise. It was that they were lived. Gelsinger shared pivotal moments from his career, including a time he agreed to suppress expressions of his Christian faith in the workplace under corporate pressure. From the outside, this may have seemed like a smart career move. But for Gelsinger, it marked one of the most spiritually disorienting times in his life. The lesson was clear: when we compromise our core values to perform or be accepted, we don't just lose integrity -- we lose clarity about who we are.
In a high-performance culture like Stanford's, we are constantly invited to confuse what we do with who we are. Gelsinger's view is that ambition is not the problem. In fact, he sees it as a God-given trait. But it must be stewarded -- not worshipped.
Gelsinger challenged the audience to consider: who are you becoming in the process of your ambition? Are you becoming more honest, more generous, more grounded? Or are you simply becoming more strategic, more polished and more impressive to a system that does not know you and cannot love you?
This is not just a question for Christians like Gelsinger and myself. It's a question for all humans. If our identity is built entirely on output, what happens when that output stops?
Karolina Pusz Bochenska captured this perfectly in an essay for The Grind. After finishing a research project that had defined her for years, she wrote of a "phantom pain" -- an identity withdrawal. The thing that once gave her purpose was gone, and with it, her sense of self. "Closure isn't about cutting ties," she wrote. "It's about honoring what shaped you without letting it define you." Our accomplishments matter, but they do not determine our value.
This is a radical idea in places like Silicon Valley where respect is often measured in titles, startup exits and numbers of degrees. But Gelsinger resisted. He spoke not from his resume but from his character -- of faith, family and a desire to use his platform to serve. He quoted Colossians 3:23: "Work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men." That verse isn't just about diligence -- it's about orientation. Who are you ultimately working for?
Gelsinger's reframing of ambition allows us to root our purpose in something deeper, more eternal and more stable than our accomplishments. If our identity is grounded in character -- formed through integrity, shaped by values and, for me, rooted in my identity as a child of God -- we gain clarity, resilience and freedom. Our work then becomes an expression of who we are and not the source of it. And maybe that's what real success looks like.