ambitious women

Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our ... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more

As a recovering perfectionist and Type A high-achiever, I wish some wise mentor sat me down early in my career to explain the difference between ambition and agency.

 I think ambition can be a lot more collective and a lot more expansive than it’s given credit for. And I think that when we funnel into this completely work driven, completely output driven striving, we really miss the imaginative or community centered components of it that I think most of us are ambitious about having in our lives in some fo

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Ambition is the drive to play games that others have created. Climb the corporate ladder. Play politics. Work long hours. Lean in—to corporate feminism.

helping someone achieve their dreams is not the same thing as achieving your own.  Or put another way, making someone else the focus of your ambition is not the same as having a self-centered, work-centered ambition. The two are different. One is selfish, the other is selfless. And lately I’ve been thinking: why is it so difficult—maybe impos

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