ON AMBITION
Can ambition bring you closer to yourself?
Ambition feels like a pull. A quiet sense that something inside you wants to go somewhere. The light in your eyes when you talk about an idea. The thought that keeps coming back. Excited and scared at the same time.
Ambition is movement. It asks us to leave where we are in pursuit of somewhere we haven’t been before. Not always physically. Mentally. And on that journey, change is bound to happen. We build new muscles. Adopt new behaviours. Try different ways of thinking. Being.
It’s also the moment we become most aware of other people’s blueprints. We look to those who’ve already built the career we want, the business we admire, the life we aspire to. We borrow their habits. Their advice. Their definition of confidence. Their version of ambition.
And without noticing, ambition stops asking “What do I really want?” and starts asking “Who do I need to become to get it?”
What does it take?
(Because frankly, I’ll do it.)
A note on career advice, borrowed blueprints, and why ambition might start with the wrong question.
Is ambition too much? Or an inherent, unstoppable feeling of “not enough”?
Ambition has a complicated reputation. In one person, we admire it. In another, we call it arrogance. Too little ambition, and people wonder whether you’ve quietly given up. Too much, and they wonder whether you’ll ever be satisfied. As if the right amount of ambition exists somewhere between gratitude and greed. A socially acceptable quota for wanting things.
We often label ambition as an inability to be content. A constant feeling that life should be bigger. Better. More. Like a toxic little voice in our heads constantly whispering: Not enough. Suggesting the real goal is to get rid of ambition altogether and simply learn to be grateful.
What if we got it wrong?
What if ambition isn’t standing between us and a life we can “simply enjoy”? What if the problem isn’t ambition at all, but the way we see it. Interact with it. Label it?
Ambition isn’t evidence that you’re dissatisfied with who you are. It’s evidence there’s still more of you left to become.
Whose ambition is this?
We know by now that much of our ambition is awakened by the outside world.
We inherit ideas about success long before we begin pursuing them. We absorb them from our parents, our industries, our cultures, the people we admire and, increasingly, the people we scroll past every day.
Perhaps that’s why we’re so quick to distrust the quiet voice that whispers, I want that too.
A colleague gets promoted. A friend starts a business. Someone publishes a book. Something stirs. A pull. A longing. The faintest thought that you might want the same.
And almost immediately, another voice steps in.
Is that really my dream? Or did I just borrow it from someone else?
What if we’re asking the wrong question?
What if the outside world isn’t simply a place that fuels comparison, greed or discontent? What if it’s also where we discover possibilities we didn’t know existed. Lives we hadn’t imagined. Versions of ourselves we hadn’t yet considered becoming.
Maybe ambition doesn’t become less real because someone else lived it first. Of course our ambitions are influenced. How could they not be?
The more interesting question is what happens next.
When an ambition finds us, and refuses to leave, can we be curious enough to stop asking where it came from, and start asking whether we’d like to make it ours?
Every ambition that finds its way to you deserves your curiosity before you choose to pursue it or let it go.
The anatomy of your ambition
Ambition rarely arrives with full clarity. Before asking whether an ambition is achievable, it helps to ask whether it’s truly yours. These are five lenses for looking a little closer.
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Passing excitement usually disappears as quickly as it arrives. Your ambition has an odd habit of returning. Weeks later. Months later. Sometimes years later. Not louder, just persistent enough to wonder why it keeps asking for your attention.
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Envy is often dismissed as something to overcome. But every now and then, it points towards something worth paying attention to. Beneath the comparison may be admiration. Curiosity. A life not yet lived. The question isn’t whether someone else had the idea first. It’s whether what first arrived as envy slowly becomes a genuine desire to build a life that feels like your own.
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Strip away the applause. The announcement. The congratulatory messages. The story you’d tell other people. If something meaningful remains, the ambition probably isn’t being held together by recognition alone.
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We tend to imagine ambition in moments: the promotion, the launch, the standing ovation. But ambitions are lived on ordinary Tuesdays. Before pursuing one, spend some time imagining the life that surrounds the milestone. The meetings. The inbox. The conversations. The work. If the ordinary still feels exciting, that’s a cue to suggest this ambition is actually yours. -
Some ambitions ask us to become someone else. Others seem to uncover parts of us that were already there. They don’t shrink the self or pull it further away. They create space for more of it. The right ambition often feels less like putting on a costume and more like growing into a version of yourself that has been quietly waiting.
Can ambition bring you closer to yourself?
Eventually, every ambition brings us to the same question: What does it take?
And because so many of our ambitions are awakened by the outside world, that’s usually where we go looking for the answer too.
We search for the blueprint. The formula. The habits. The mindset. We listen to the people who have already climbed the mountain we’re hoping to climb, assuming that if we simply do what they did, we’ll arrive where they arrived.
Perhaps that’s why so much career advice sounds so certain. Speak up. Take up space. Network. Be visible. Tell people what you want.
It’s not wrong advice, nor does it come from a place of wanting to cause harm. But in the end, most advice is autobiographical. It’s the story of what happened to work for one person, in one context, with one personality, at one moment in time.
Perhaps ambition doesn’t ask us to become experts in success. Perhaps it asks us to become experts in ourselves.
To notice what energizes us. What stretches us. What keeps quietly returning. What kind of ordinary Tuesdays we want to wake up to. What we’re willing to work for long after the novelty has disappeared.
Because maybe the real achievement isn’t simply reaching the summit.
Maybe it’s arriving there with a clearer understanding of who you are than when you started climbing.
Perhaps that’s what ambition was trying to show you all along.