Rethinking Ambition

I have always been ambitious.

I tend to set ever-increasing, challenging goals and to push myself.

Damn it!

It would be a lot more fun to be a free spirit.

To take each day as it comes. 

To live the day without an agenda and a plan. 

To not need to be productive—or to accomplish something to be valued.

But it’s who I am. I just came out this way. My core values lock me into this—things like excellence and achievement. But my siblings and I are all perfectionists—which started because our mother was too. She always challenged us. 

When we went on long car rides, we didn’t just play the alphabet game—we did activities in educational books to help make us smarter. We didn’t talk about silly things at dinner—we each shared something we learned that day. My mother was horrified to learn that some children would start kindergarten not knowing how to use scissors, so she made us learn those kinds of skills, too.

And when I hit first grade, she wanted me to be challenged—so she asked my teacher to give me an extra credit project. 

An extra credit project! 

In first grade!

I had to draw pictures and write in a composition book of insects and animals I saw around the pond where we lived. I drew pictures of birds and other living things in crayon. I wrote things like, “There are lots of tadpoles swimming around in our pond. Their tails make them move. They move very fast.” 

Sounds like a cool project, right?

Except it was extra work.

And it taught me to continue to do the same thing.

Strive to learn more.

To always be better, do better, to never be satisfied with where I am. 

It’s what led me to work in the non-profit sector—because I believe we can make the world better. It’s possible to create more equitable and effective systems and communities.

But here’s the thing I have learned about ambition: You can never stop.

You can exhaust yourself trying to get to that next thing.

You can focus so much on work that you don’t have room for much else.

You can have strings of days where your brain is so filled up with everything that you have no space left for anything else.

You can drive yourself and others nutty with your constant movement forward.

In an interview on the Slight Change of Plans podcast about rethinking ambition, Jennifer Romolini challenges listeners to think about ambition differently. She tells the story about how she used to strive and strive and strive—but then she hit a turning point, and changed her life.

She found the quiet of a different kind of achievement.

Romilini says that ambition doesn’t have to be big, or even monumental. Sometimes the most satisfying success can be quiet and small.

Ambition can be: 

To take a day that is just for you and things you love to do.

To spend a quiet weekend with your spouse or child.

To play with a new, quiet hobby.

To practice a quiet skill like patience or presence.

Romolini suggested, “Use ambition to bring your life into color, into fullness. Ambition is a force. You can harness that force for good, or you can harness that force in a way that takes you away from yourself, into things that carry you away from yourself.” 

How do you use ambition?

Do you use it in a way to bring you closer to yourself?

What new boundaries might you need to set to connect with ambition that is quiet and small?

How might you use it to bring your life into fuller color? 

Maybe achievement is not so important. Maybe it’s evolution that matters. There’s that great Chinese proverb that I think about here: “Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.”

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