The Altar of Ambition
Most conversations about ambition are about its quantity. Too much ambition and you’ll get consumed in the process; too little ambition and you’ll live in mediocrity.
In a domain where ambition is particularly celebrated, a venture capitalist wrote the following in response to the question “what do we look for in a founder’s personality”:
We begin with ambition. If founders don’t have it, they will hardly develop it. They are either playing to win, or playing just to be there. Big and successful companies get built by people with endless ambition. What drives the ambitions is a different story but it has to be present.
What drives the ambitions is a different story. When you want to know if your ambition will serve you or eat you alive, this is the question to examine with utmost intellectual honesty.
Notably, I posit the object of the ambition is irrelevant. There is a belief that some things are more “worthwhile” of ambition than others—it’s more worthwhile to be ambitious about eradicating racism than about becoming famous. I think this is focusing on the wrong part of the corpus—it is the ambition that needs to be examined, not the object of it. There are objects that are more likely to be driven by unhealthy ambition, but all objects can be driven by healthy or unhealthy ambition.
Unfortunately, there are many ways we delude ourselves when trying to figure out what drives our ambition, often because the answer is too uncomfortable to acknowledge.
This self-delusion is particularly dangerous because ambition is demanding; we have finite attention and time, so chasing our ambition requires sacrifice. There are few tragedies worse than sacrificing something only to realize at the end of the journey, the thing you sacrificed for isn’t what you wanted after all.
My goal in this post is to help you see the driver of your ambition clearly. You can then decide what to do with it (or perhaps there will be a part 2).
To help you get to this answer, ask yourself three questions. We’ll then examine the underlying drivers behind your answers.
If I achieve my ambition, what do I believe will be true? Answers might include—I will get the respect I deserve; I will feel like I lived up to my potential; I will be safe
What would need to be true for me to believe I have achieved the above outcome?—e.g. what would need to be true for me to believe I have the respect I deserve?
What will I feel if I don’t achieve the object of my ambition from question 2?
Healthy and Unhealthy Ambition
It might feel sanctimonious to label some ambitions as healthy and some as unhealthy, but my lens is purely pragmatic: at the end of your life, will you be happy that you pursued your ambition?
What differentiates healthy and unhealthy ambition is laughably simple—if your ambition is driven by the feeling of lacking something, it is likely unhealthy. Healthy ambition doesn’t feel like you’re trying to fill a hole. Because there is no lacking, healthy ambition focuses on pursuing things that help you thrive.
The trickiness of lack-driven ambition is discerning if what you feel you’re missing can be fulfilled by the thing you’re chasing. This requires a nuanced understanding of what you actually feel is missing.
You might lack shelter, healthcare, a job, or transportation and have the ambition to obtain it. If that is the true driver of your ambition, once you have attained these items, your feeling of lack will disappear. The dangerous lack-driven ambitions are the ones where no matter what you attain, your feeling of lack never disappears. This is what I mean by your ambition will eat you alive.
Two common drivers are the fear of lack of control and the desire to be enough (a lack of worthiness).
Fear of Lack of Control
Never take counsel of your fears.
Stonewall Jackson (attributed)
Ambitions driven by fear feel like you’re being chased. At the root of all ambitions of fear is just one: the fear of lack of control—we want to make sure bad things don’t happen to us.
There are two popular hypotheses on how to make sure bad things don’t happen to us: the accumulation of money and the accumulation of status.
Of course, it is impossible to make sure bad things don’t happen to us; those who are motivated by this driver will find no matter how much they accumulate, they still feel unsafe. Money and status can’t control for the things we worry about the most—if a person we love will love us back, if we will find meaning in having lived, if somebody we love will die.
The problems that can be solved by money are simple. It’s ones that can’t be that you need to worry about.
Paraphrased from Chinese show 蜗居
The reality is that bad things will happen to us, for no obvious reasons. The sooner we acknowledge this the better, because then we can accept the fear and stop running in circles to stifle it.
The Desire to Be Enough
If ambitions driven by fear feel like being chased, ambitions driven by desire feel like a deep-seated hunger.
At the root of all ambitions of desire is the longing to be enough. This longing can never be quenched because the problem lies in the question itself—the instant you ask “am I enough?”, the battle is already lost. Worth can never be proven, especially with external things; it has to be believed so deeply that you don’t need any proof.
To better understand how ambitions of desire can present, it’s helpful to separately examine the audience you are trying to prove your worth to: others and yourself.
The desire to win the love and respect of others
Of the two, the desire to win the love and respect of others is the more familiar. The object of the ambition will often reflect what “the others” value, so it can be anything, from accumulating wealth and status to raising a happy family to, a favorite of Silicon Valley, “changing the world”.
What tends to happen when our ambitions are driven by the love and respect of others is we need constant, external proof of our worth and the smallest slight can cause that worth to evaporate —even after we have done incredible things like change the world.
As an aside, a particularly insidious variant of this driver is to opt out of what others value. This looks like saying—oh, you value status, but I value something more important: happiness. A telltale sign of this variant is if you look at other people’s drivers of ambition with disdain.
The desire to win the love and respect of yourself
The second worthiness desire is much subtler. What often has happened is you have internalized the “not enough” narrative so much that you are no longer driven by the desire to prove yourself to others but rather to prove yourself to yourself.
This driver often hides behind ambition that looks healthy, such as wanting to live up to your potential or to live a meaningful life. But if your answer to the third question what will I feel if I don’t achieve the object of my ambition is something like then I won’t have had a meaningful life, the seed of your ambition is a lack of worth.
The reality is the fact you are alive means your life is meaningful. This reality is almost impossible to internalize for somebody who doubts their worthiness—you mean…the thing I spent my life striving for was something I had all along?
Because the question “am I worthy?” can never be answered with achievements, you will never be able to feel your life was worthwhile.
Healthy Ambition
Contrary to popular belief, feeling like we don’t lack anything doesn’t leave us with no ambition. Instead, it gives us the capacity to go farther in achieving our ambitions, because our ambitions are fueled by the sustainable and exuberant energy of joy, love, and play.
You can aspire to change the world because it will bring you joy; you can want to write a bestseller because you love to write; you can seek a promotion because the new job will be fun. In fact, rather than being a sign that you’re not working hard enough at your ambition, one of the most reliable way markers of healthy ambition is you’re having fun.
Not every moment of achieving an ambition will be fun and joyful, of course, but if you ask yourself the same third question what will I feel if I don’t achieve the object of my ambition?, I hope your answer is something like I’d be sad, of course; I worked hard and things didn’t pan out. But man, I had a lot of fun trying.
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Huge thanks to Shivanku for taking this post from circular navel gazing to something that is hopefully valuable to you.