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Larry Ellison: “Overachievers are not driven by the pursuit of success but the fear of failure”

November 13, 2025

“We human beings are endlessly curious about ourselves.” Oracle founder Larry Ellison begins. “We love to test ourselves constantly, and we find all sorts of arenas to test ourselves in. Right now, I have the fastest racing sailboat in the world . . . and I’m discovering all sorts of things about me as I race that boat. I discover all sorts of things about me every day as Oracle competes with Microsoft for supremacy in the software world.”

This reminds Ellison of the saying: “I climbed the mountain because it was there.”

“That is utter nonsense,” He argues. “You climb the mountain because you were there and you were curious if you could do it. You wondered what it would be like. You wondered what the view was from the top. That’s how we explore. The thing that we’re most interested in is exploring our own limits and exploring our relationship with others. We’re much more interested in each other and ourself than we are in anything else. I think there are two things that are important in life: self-discovery (learning about yourself) and your relationship with others. And I spend my entire life in those two areas.”

Ellison continues:

“We’re constantly testing ourselves. We’re trying to understand our own level of competency and our ability to control our own world — our ability to put ourselves at risk and then save our own lives . . . I think most overachievers are driven not so much by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure. Unless failure gets very close and very nearby, that fear doesn’t reach profound levels, but it drives us. It drives me. It drives me to work very hard. It drives me to make sure that my life is orderly — that I’m in control of my company or in control of the airplane or boat or what have you so that I’m not at risk of failure. And whenever I feel even remotely close to being at risk of failure, I can’t stop working.”