You can be motivated as much as you want, but tomorrow you can be replaced. Your company gets acquired, and you happen to be in the "wrong" office. Bye bye. Or whatever other reason. Covid! Bye bye again.
We are just minions with a good technical knowledge. And if you don't step up and get closer and closer to CTO level you'll be "just" working on features, sporadically "exceeding the goals set" and get rewarded for that. Yay. Get the most out of it and that's it. If that's enough for you, so be it.
Learn, develop, make shit happen, iterate.
Do you want to have a major impact? It takes hours and stress from your own personal life (I couldn't stress this out more), things don't come easily.
If you want to have power you need to be your own boss. And even then I wonder how much power you truly have.
If it falls in your lap, take it. But don't count on it. Leverage the extra money under the assumption that you're out in three months. It's position formed of a certain mix of competence, pedigree, communication ability, and politics. Tenuous.
That's exactly my MO. The extent to which many people start to overidentify with their job is almost comical. If they are lucky it may actually pay off at least. But more likely than not they are just deferring the inevitable conclusion that work is at the end of the day just a (hopefully enjoyable) waste of time so you can afford living.
That said, life is very short. Big companies are a great way to make pretty good comp in exchange for dealing with a ton of dysfunction. I know people who don’t get bothered by it at all - they separate themselves and their 8-10 hours a day and compartmentalize.
If you can’t do that, though ...
The only reason to work for mega corps once you’ve got enough in the way of assets that you are already dialed in for the normal retirement age is because you’re vesting out a package.
I was at a startup company that in my opinion got a great idea and with enough focus, we could have been successful. I always tried to think about the product, the impact, the roadmap, the quality... And after some time I realized that I just annoy the founders and I care and worry more about things then they do. So I decided to care about half as much as they did and in the meantime look for another job.
Today, I work at a big corporation, I was again motivated to be able to change things, improve things. The feature I recently worked on was just put on a roadmap with a ridiculous deadline, our work is blocked by like 5 different backend teams around the country, and somehow I should bend over backwards to deliver on time?
Keeping your motivation is hard when everything around you is trying squash it.
And I am not even sure it's a problem. Of course I wouldn't say this at my next job interview, but in reality, if you are motivated, most often you will get disappointed really fast. On the other hand, when you just go in to work, do a reasonable amount of effort, then you can work better with others with less stress, and in the end, who cares about "those few extra units"?