This Will Change the Way You Think About Ambition

 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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And I think that’s one of our enduring understandings of what ambition has to be something massive, something that rules your life and every decision you make, something that never stops burning, and crucially, something that somehow lands people in this mystical land of perfect contentment. If you’ve ever known someone whose primary attribute is a

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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

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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Let yourself become more ambitious—figure out the most interesting version of where what you’re working on could go. Then talk about that big vision and work relentlessly towards it, but always have a reasonable next step. You don’t want step one to be incorporating the company and step two to be going to Mars.

The popular narrative of ambition defines it as coming from a place of scarcity, and that leads to guilt over seeming thankless or wanting more than we have. True ambition ideally comes from a place of abundance, which means being ambitious in ‘doing’ and ‘being’ but being content in ‘having’.