> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing.

I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all.

I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were intensely ambitious. What made the difference is that they ultimately cared more about the people they served than about serving their own ego.