If anything, parent comment's usage of orthogonal might've been a typo/mistake. People usually use orthogonal as a metaphorical term to imply "no correlation" [1]. My read of the OP is that anxiety powers others' ambition, that they are portraying the relationship between the two as correlated/causal rather than orthogonal.

edit: to clarify a bit further, I believe the term comes from how vectors that diverge along some dimension form a right angle, rather than a correlation (i.e., if one vector is (0, 5) and the other is (4, 0), they form a right angle )and are orthogonal, meaning "wherever you are on the (4,0) line doesn't correlate with where you are on the (0, 5) line". This might be a bad explanation but it's how I've understood it from working somewhere where coworkers use the term a lot.

[1] See "software engineering" definition here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orthogonal