From "The Broken American Male - And How to Fix Him" by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach:

Another New York hedge-fund manager with whom I am friendly came to see me to discuss a shocking secret. Married for twenty years, he was in the midst of a destructive affair from which he wished to extricate himself He was asking me how to do so and how to tell his wife. I had always thought he had a very happy marriage. This is a man who makes, without exaggeration, about fifty million dollars a year in fees from his fund. He is enormously successful. "What was missing in your life that you felt the need to do this?" I asked him. He told me that one day he was reading the Time - the magazine's annual list of the one hundred most influential people in the world - and saw one of his acquaintances on the list in the business category. Like him, his colleague was a hedge-fund manager. "Shmuley, I felt like a failure. I'm forty-eight years old, and here is this guy I know who's voted one of the hundred most influential people in the world. And who has even ever heard of me? I guess, after that, I was really vulnerable. My secretary saw my depression and we started talking every day, and one thing led to another." Incredible. A man with everything was throwing his blessings away because he wasn't on a magazine list.

I had something of a reverse experience with lists. In April 2007 Newsweek magazine published a list of the fifty most influential rabbis in America. The list put me at number nine, and then added that I had been called "the most famous rabbi in America." That day media calls poured in for comment. What did it feel like to be the best known rabbi and among the top ten in influence? Truth be told, it felt good, but also horrible, and I said so. I mentioned that the list was probably corrosive. And why? Because I knew that now I, and the forty-nine others on the list, would feel enormous pressure to make sure we were on the list the following year as well. Our value as rabbis, as spiritual leaders, had been given a number value, a quotient. The list would also ensure that we chose to do the kind of work that got noticed so that we would be on the list the following year, as would all those unnoticed rabbis who had not made this year's list. What would happen to all the unspoken, quiet acts of kindness and counseling that rabbis do every year, which are the true stuff of greatness? Would they just be lost? I write these lines just two months after the list came out. It's done nothing for me other than give me a brief ego boost and leave me in anxiety about my standing in spiritual America. But our country is obsessed with lists. We love them, we live for them. Everything in America has a price tag, everything can be given a numerical value, especially human beings. There's one problem. People are of infinite value, and when they are reduced to a place on a list, even when they are at the top of the list, they are regressing.