Beyond our basic ambition

Is our current concept of ambition, ambitious enough? [Don’t Work: Part 05]

Aug 25, 2024

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Series: Don’t Work | Part: 5 of 10 | Reading Time: 7 mins
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This is part of the series, Don’t Work, exploring our identity and meaning around work.

I. Sacrifice at the altar of ambition

After years of hard work, I picked my head up in the middle of my career, only to realize I had lost all my ambition.

After hitting on something big in my last chapter, I thought I needed another big, ambitious next step. Doing something significant seemed like the next-logical-thing that one does in this situation.

But, the problem was, I no longer craved getting to that next level of professional success. I had tasted career and financial achievement. But I felt done. I lost my appetite for more.

Maybe you too have experienced even a momentary lapse in ambition, wondering: “is this what I’m striving for?”

Rather than feel satiated, I became worried that I had lost my edge. I thought I needed that deep hunger and intensity that drove me before, drove me to success, and drove my sense of meaning in the world. So I disappeared in order to rekindle the old ambition.

But that feeling never returned… my ambition was gone.

II. Expanding the surface area of ambition

But, wait a minute. No, that’s not right.

My ambition wasn’t gone, it just felt different. Actually, I was as hungry as ever.

Once I removed the blinders of my work-ambition, I started to notice that my purpose was not dissolving, but evolving. I thought…

What about ambition to be a great father and husband? To have deep, meaningful relationships with the people closest to me.
What about ambition to live a long, healthy life? Full of energy and vigor. Capable and ready to seize each day.
What about ambition for a cause? Creating a new perspective and way of looking at the world. One that attempts to leave the world in a little better place.
What about ambition to be a better citizen? To make a dent in my universe - the neighborhood and community where I can influence.
What about creative ambition? To exercise new skills. Make something special and original, regardless of popularity or commercial success.
What about ambition to be a complete, multi-dimensional human? To live a great full-life, not just a great work-life. Embracing the entirety of what it is to be human.
What about ambition for an ordinary life? Present and at peace, not fueled by stress and a never-ending need to do more.

Instead of losing my ambition, I realized I had expanded the surface area of it.

Unfortunately, as I looked outside myself, I was disappointed to see that the full extent of these new aims was not reflected in the world. That our culture and its idols did not share the same ambitions.

So I created my own.

III. Basic Ambition → Broad Ambition

Multi-Dimensional

Basic Ambition is one-dimensional. It’s really only concerned with one lane of ambition, one mountain to climb. Basic Ambition says, “pick one thing and go all the way to the extreme.” Other ambitions be damned. It’s as if we looked at the whole pie of ourselves, and then decided that one extraordinarily narrow slice required all our effort and attention.

Broad Ambition is multi-dimensional. It sees the entire landscape. And sees beyond our narrow view to the complete and diverse universe of experience. We are an entire person after all, not simply this or that slice (a Doctor, a Director, a Parent, a <insert whatever label you carry>). When others zoom in on one piece of our ambition, they may deem it too small. When, in reality, our ambition is much larger in totality, and it is their narrow ambition that is too small for us.

Enough

Basic Ambition sees no end to its ambition. Go big. Keep going. There is always more. There is never too much. There is never enough.

Broad Ambition knows enough. It sees the tradeoffs at play. It can say “no” to even the most seductive offers. Instead of mindlessly hoarding a surplus of status, money, or really anything, it leaves money on the table and meat on the bone. Broad Ambition understands that sometimes, the most ambitious act is to show restraint.

Intrinsic

Basic Ambition is shaped by our culture. We chase other people’s dreams through extrinsic, external markers of success. The measures which are exclusively quantifiable: money, status, achievements. The “good life,” from this view, really comes down to whether others thought we lived a good life.

Broad Ambition is shaped from within. It may sample cultural standards like a menu, freely picking and choosing what makes sense. But it also freely invents its own. What matters most, however, is how we feel about it, inside ourselves. The Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman puts it well, “I’m perfectly content leading a life that is meaningless, but feels meaningful to me. And that’s good enough.”1

Human

Basic Ambition sees us as Homo Economicus,2 as if our sole pursuit in life is purely economic output and progress. The grand measures include things like income, net worth, and productivity. Again, it’s just one lane shaped by the outside. In our era, these pursuits are shaped by The Market. In another era, they’d be shaped by some other cultural standard.

Broad Ambition sees us as humans filled with a complex cocktail of needs and emotions. It’s the macro, human view. Broad Ambition recognizes that we cannot confuse the specialist required for a job, with the generalist required for being human. We do not need only one thing, but many. And sometimes we need less.

Aware

Basic Ambition tries to push us when we feel a bit of unease and skepticism. It’s the person in the corner of the ring yelling at us to shut up, get up, and keep fighting. “Am I in the right fight?” some small part of us might wonder. But they respond: “shut up and get back to fighting!”

Broad Ambition pays attention to these moments of unease. What’s happening here? Why do we feel off? Sometimes we must endure through. And sometimes we must ease off. An old Cherokee proverb says it best: "Pay attention to the whispers, so we won't have to listen to the screams."

Evolving

Basic Ambition is fixed. It’s one box driven into us as a child and reinforced over-and-over again through our lives. It’s supposed to stay with us, changeless until death, as if there’s one objective truth. We may be allowed to iterate off the fixed model, but only so slightly, not too far.

Broad Ambition understands the fluidity of life. Sometimes there’s value in pushing hard in a narrow lane. And sometimes there’s value in being lost, disappearing, or unproductive. Or in evolving our ambitions altogether. That life is not one continuous sprint, but a long, unfolding journey. Continuously discovered across many seasons of our life.

Enduring

Basic Ambition thinks there’s a destination. One called “success.” We fall for the arrival fallacy,3 thinking that getting somewhere will bring happiness. And when we get there, another outcome is added in its place. We keep having to achieve and achieve, in an endless loop.

Broad Ambition sees the outcome and process working together. Notably, it does not require success. Sometimes the value is in the doing, regardless of the outcome. Instead, the better outcome is the ability to keep doing the thing that fulfills you. Seth Godin says it best: “In skiing, the goal is not to get to the bottom of the hill. The goal is to have a bunch of good runs before the sun sets.”

Ours

Basic Ambition relieves you of the responsibility to define your own ambition. It offers the conventional paths of success. Be bold and pursue greatness! But, by the way, only do so in the few ways on this list over here. It’s stuck in a bubble of expectations.

Broad Ambition sees the available paths and also the hidden ones. Even the ones that can be created on their own. Our aim may be to do something bold, but bold in our own way. It values alternative paths because they offer a glimpse of what we truly want: to author and own our ambition.

IV. Authors of our own ambition

"We should make sure… that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along." Alain de Botton4

Maybe my ambition is not for you. Maybe it’s not clear or focused enough. Or maybe you aren’t there yet, and simply need to put one foot in front of the other, stacking ambitions.

The point of this is not for you to buy into my ambition. The point is to tell you how I made my ambition my own. How I saw beyond my own narrow-minded version of “Basic Ambition.” And how I was able to redefine, not abandon ambition.

Yes, we may have reasons for a conventional ambition: a new job, the birth of a child, the need to make ends meet. But consider these as just one form of ambition.

They’re not bad. They’re just not the endgame. One specific flavor amongst many, with a time and a place, maybe a season of life. A part, but not the whole.

So consider: what’s your own version of Basic Ambition? The obvious one right in front of you. That you’re supposed to follow.

Is that concept of ambition, ambitious enough?

Or do you have an opportunity to author your own ambition?

Next up, I’m going to continue this theme, considering the work beyond work.