The truth about ambition
I have always been a very driven and highly ambitious person. From the time I was a child I would always find ways to get what I wanted. We travelled the world (I took my first flight hardly a few months old), studied in good schools and enjoyed the precious moments life had to offer. We never had to worry about income. The reality is my father who has a phenomenal ambition built an entire life for us from scratch. It is probably those qualities that resonate in me today as I look at what I would like to do with my life. To many I already have a life worthy of envy — I have a couple degrees, a good employment profile and a comfortable life. But to me, I am constantly struggling to make the life I aspire to have. The reality is, I have a very big ambition for how I want things to be, which means in the near term I have to give up the comfort of satisfaction. It never feels like enough.
Ambition fuels a great motivation to achieve but it is also paired with a dark side of desire, which sometimes feels so excruciatingly hard to achieve.
Here are my 3 truths about ambitious people.
1. Build a steel clad conviction
“There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.” — Elon Musk
Celebrity CEOs like Elon Musk have incredibly lofty goals like putting humans on Mars. These are very complex goals that are by no means easy to achieve. The only way to get there is to have a vision and an unwavering belief in making it happen. Though I have goals that may not be as far reaching, I am often in the face of criticism — “You can’t do that” or “What a crazy idea” is the kind of things I hear often. If I let others dictate what I can achieve, chances are I would have given up a long time ago. The reality is very ambitious people by design set themselves up for failure and only through countless attempts can they find success in their endeavours. You cannot let other people’s beliefs and opinions change your mind for you. The reality is only you know what you can do and you have to have conviction to stay true to your ambition.
2. Reject the status quo
Ambition means you don’t easily fit into the status quo of life. Living the 9 to 5 day job will not make our dreams come true. While that seems obvious what is less obvious is how hard it can sometimes feels to walk on the path less taken. As an entrepreneur I often find my friends and family can’t always understand those lonely days where I sit alone writing an article or building a new business case. I live with uncertainty all around. Looking at those around me who feel confident in their daily jobs and happily go home to their Netflix shows, I wonder how much simpler life would be without that ambition. But creating lasting change and impacting the world around us requires sacrifice of what is comfortable now in hopes of creating a magical future.
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Rob Siltanen
3. Prioritize practice over perfection
As an entrepreneur who is also a perfectionist by nature, I find that it is the single biggest obstacle in getting things done. Being perfect slows me down and means I cannot continually iterate fast enough. To achieve my goals I need to put as much as I can out there fast. There is no such thing as perfect and the quicker we can understand that the better it will be to focus our energies on what really matters to move the dial forward. Of course that doesn’t mean doing bad work, it just means putting an emphasis on execution.
“If you look for perfection, you’ll never be content.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
What does ambition mean to you? Share your thoughts below.
