Ambition is weird, man.
As per its formal definition ambition is “a strong desire to do or achieve something”, but there is so much to unpack here that it feels wrong to talk about ambition in this vacuum of reason. One cannot deprive of passion what is by definition related to desire.
It is 1:30 AM and I suddenly felt the urge to write this essay, or “a strong desire to do it”, but this meaningless word soup does not seem ambitious to me in any way. I might even take a jab at saying that it would be more ambitious to deprive myself of writing it. Is the aforementioned “strong desire” enough to describe such an abstract and under-discussed (at least properly) concept? Not to me.
Ambition is also often referred to as the “desire and determination to achieve success.” This feels more appropriate to how the word is commonly used in conversations, especially due to the malleability of the object it refers to: success. (Maybe “success” is a good subject for another exploratory essay like this one)
Personal ambition
Ever since I was a small kid, I have often been described as an ambitious person. I never gave it much thought rather than “Cool, I guess!”, but recent events have led to my fall into exploratory rabbit holes of concepts that we take for granted, one of them being ambition.
So then I asked myself: “Why do people appear to enjoy saying that I am ambitious?”. It completely baffled me that I had literally 0 good answers other than the ones that already take sociologically pre-conceived ideas for granted. Some of these included: He is ambitious because he… “does not take no for an answer”… “defies pre-conceived ideas”… “wants to build his own company”… “does not seem to feel satisfied”… among others.
While on a superficial analysis these might seem to prove ambition, none of these really do. Most of the aforementioned attempts to justify ambition say more about the mental models of the person spitting the words than the one supposed to be evaluated by them.
Allow me to explain.
“does not take no for an answer” - the person talking would have taken no for an answer;
“defies pre-conceived ideas” - the person talking does not define them;
“wants to build his own company” - the person talking sees that as something impossibly hard;
“does not seem to feel satisfied” - the person talking is satisfied.
If the people judging had done any of these things or possessed the required mental models to pursue them, they would not call me ambitious, at least not in the way that most people use when word. They might have called me courageous, unsatisfied, stupid, fool, curious, defiant, but not ambitious.
Looking at others’ minds
How then, does one define another as ambitious. I’ve defined people as ambitious before. Was I wrong?
In this search of a single source of truth for classifying someone as ambitious (which might be foolish to start with) I believe it is necessary to frame people according to their own mental models as best as we can.
What is ambitious to me might not be at all ambitious to others’, and vice-versa. This is fine. As it turns out, ambition, much like beauty, lives within one’s mind and will collide with different versions of itself as soon as it tries to escape. However, unlike beauty, the classification of one’s ambition cannot come from your definition, but from theirs. There are not many concepts that follow this rule (at least that my sleepy brain can think of right now) and this is why we mess it up so often.
Even after realizing these things, I find it hard to write the right formula on how to tell if someone is truly ambitious. Here is my best attempt:
Is the other person willingly pushing their own boundaries to achieve some specific goal? If so, they are ambitious.
(You are more than welcome to shoot counter-examples at me. I intend to refine my single source of truth on ambition)
Is ambition even good?
Most people see being ambitious as a marvelous thing. Why do we regard the pursuit of things we cannot yet obtain so highly as to transform the courage to go after them into a desirable compliment?
When candidates for public office in ancient Rome wanted to be elected, they had to spend most of their time going around the city urging the citizens to vote for them. The Latin word for this effort was ambitio, which came from ambire, a verb meaning “to go around.” Since this activity was caused by a desire for honor or power, the word eventually came to mean “the desire for honor or power.”
Are we then complimenting those who desire honor and power? And does our current use of the word accommodate for not being ambitious being ok?
If what James clear wrote in Atomic Habits- “Happiness is simply the absence of desire.”- is true, then it seems pretty stupid to give high praise to those who desire things so bad has to dedicate their time to get them. I am not entirely sure of what to think of any of this, because I sure want a lot of things. The thought of starting to praise people who are satisfied with what they have sounds so alien to our current social order that I cannot even start to think about how that would change the world. Would a world of non-wanting be better than a world of wanting, much like non-doing is often better than doing? (If this “non-doing” thing sounds weird as hell, research Alexander technique. It’s awesome.)
This is why I love exploratory essays. I had no idea it would move in this direction and lead me to question what I always thought to be certain: Ambition is good. I shall not explore the effects of non-wanting for now, for the sake of writing something legible. (Sacrificing understanding for legibility, weak, I know)
What if ambition was neither good nor bad? Tools are only as valuable or detrimental as the use we give them. Can ambition be a non-tangible concept that works in the same way? If so, where do we draw the line between good and bad? The more I think about it, the more it seems like we should not even attempt to do it, at least not on an objective level like: Ambition to X = Good; Ambition to Y = Bad.
What we can do is evaluate if ambition is good for the individuals who possess it (ambition as a tool here). Speaking from the POV of someone who considers himself ambitious, I have never doubted even for once that it is a good thing because the pursuit of things, the journey, if you will, feels good and leads me to reach higher grounds. However, now that I have thought about the concept of non-wanting as part of Alexander Technique, I am reminded that in the happiest moments of my life I did not desire more than exactly what I had at the time which means that ambition was not present. Did ambition lead me to live those moments and then vanish to let me enjoy them? Hard to tell.
Enough
It’s 3 AM and today’s exploration is over.
This was extremely interesting to me and helped put some concepts in a tidier place on this skull. Did it reveal even some bigger questions? Oh boy, yes it did, but that is how you know you are digging in the right place. Keep in mind that I am literally thinking as I write. My mind is a podcast that never stops and this is no more than a short transcription.
Takeaways
- Ambition can only be judged according to others’ mental models;
- How to access ambition: Is the other person willingly pushing their own boundaries to achieve some specific goal? If so, they are ambitious.
- Maybe ambition is not as good as I thought it was — need some more thinking.
