Do I Need To Rethink What Ambition Means To Me?

I was in a meeting and we were talking about ambition and drive. And I was joking about a wonderful client I worked with who was 80 and she would always tell me “I'm post ambition. I've done it all. I'm good.” 

As I relayed this anecdote, one of the younger people in the room said, “you know, I think I'm also post ambition.” Momentarily it took me aback… admitting you don’t feel ambitious in a work meeting with colleagues? But then someone else in the room said to this person, “I don't think you're post ambition. You said,’ I just wanna live a happy life. I wanna have a good life with the people I love.’ Maybe that's your ambition.” That was an aha moment for me. I loved this conversation.

What is ambition, anyway? I showed my bias in the meeting, because I was raised to associate ambition with self and striving. Most of us were.

Writer Rainesford Stauffer is my podcast guest this week. Her new book is All The Gold Stars, and it’s a fascinating look at ambition and achievement and how it shapes younger generations right now. Rainesford notes that ambition “evades one single all-encompassing definition. I know that we think of it as motivation, passion or drive, or a strong wish to achieve something. I don't think ambition exists outside of the institutional and structural forces that shape what it means to be ambitious. Who is encouraged to be ambitious; who is told their ambition is too much or too little? I think all of these things intersect with ambition….When we zoom out and look at the norms of ambition and who that was set up to serve, a lot of it really is grounded in this normative stereotype of an ambitious person…someone who is typically white, male, cisgender, able-bodied, has some level of access to resources, or at least choices in their life on what they want to be ambitious about.”

Stauffer started writing the book at a moment she felt she’d lost her own ambition: “I felt like I had lost something that was the key to anything good I could earn my way into. I was actually quite distressed about that. One of the things that surprised me the most over the course of reporting was that not everyone was talking about losing their ambition. I was talking to so many people in all different circumstances, all different locations, all different career paths, who were actually talking about expanding their definition of what it meant to be ambitious. That yes, one can be ambitious about work, but ambition can also exist in so many contexts outside of it.

“I hope that we can walk away with a more expansive and more imaginative definition of what ambition is and what it can be. It is absolutely valid to be as ambitious about your friends, about your community, about caring for each other as it is to be ambitious about school and work. And I think that the other part of that is that those things don’t inherently have to be in competition with each other. Maybe you are someone who feels deeply ambitious about how you serve your community, how you show up to give care, and you happen to be really ambitious about your job.”

What if we begin to think of ambition as existing outside of our own self efficacy? What if we created multiple ambitions, sort of like we now consider multiple expressions of intelligence? We know from research that goals help us stay focused and organized. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my goals to be solely in service of my own ambitions. Nor do I want to live without ambition for myself, because it’s an important part of my identity and my need to provide resources for my family. 

I set myself 4 “ambitions” for the second half of 2023… see what you think. What would yours be?

Ambition for self: Book 15 paid speaking gigs between fall 2023 and fall 2024.

Ambition for love: Become better at speaking my husband’s love language! Give him a hug every morning and say something loving and kind to my husband two times a day. 

Ambition for connection: Be a good friend. Touch base with one friend a day.

Ambition for healing. Here, I like to think of the Jewish concept of “Tikkun Olam,” an action you can take to repair the world. My goal here is to re-integrate non profit work back into my calendar (I cut it when I was launching my book!).

What would your multiple ambitions be?

Morra

I'm on vacation next week (ambition achieved!) so we will skip the newsletter.