Recovering perfectionist/people pleaser here. I think what I’ve sussed out for myself is this:
Do I want to do this thing because it’s what *I* want to do, and deep down in my body it feels good and right for me?
Or
Am I doing this because of how I want to be perceived by others/as a hustle for my worth?
I’m very new at this whole “what do *I* want out of my life” thing and it has required lots of therapy and meditation, but it has also WORKED! Ambition doesn’t feel like the right word to me when it’s coming from the deep down place. The goals that come from there might take hard work but they do NOT require me to convince myself that it’s what I want.
Ambition is merely a tool that helps us to achieve greater goals. It is only "good" in so far as our goals are worthy, and goals can be righteous, neutral, or downright evil. Some of the most ignominious people in history were great achievers, after all.
My [non-]"toxic ambition" is to earn enough money to purchase a house with a view by the time I retire. That feels like a neutral goal to me. But I would like to earn that money by writing novels that empower my generation and the next. And that feels like a 'good' goal to throw my ambition behind.
Oh man, ambition. What a topic. I had undiagnosed ADHD and didn’t get that diagnosis until I was 33 (and only because I was in the process of supporting and advocating for my daughter’s diagnosis — a common thread among women diagnosed later in life). Before that, I had resigned myself to always being sort of… stuck. Everything was too hard except the things that I was already good at (or passionate enough about to risk repeated failure). So I told myself I didn’t really have any ambitions. Which became true! I don’t know what changed — I think going on meds and realizing I wasn’t actually a complete failure as a human being (that I literally had a medical condition that made life hard!!) certainly helped. Having some perspective about what I want to be doing with my life also helped (building and contributing positively to communities I care about and belong to). And letting go of the imaginary person I thought I was — whoever she was, either superstar or abject failure — helped get me back to being, well, a person in the world who sets goals and does stuff. It’s nice once you get to the realization that we are supposed to change as we grow. :)
I feel this. I, too, started to suspect I have some kind of neurodiverse flavor after my daughter was diagnosed, and I have felt either intensely engaged or stuck for so many years with my job (teaching). That stuck feeling is so hard. For a lot of years, I chalked it up to laziness because I was raised in the rural Midwest where no one ever rests, but now I’m starting to see those stuck periods as just parts of my brain.
As for ambition, I’m intensely uncomfortable with that word. I’ve always seen it as something I don’t have “enough” of. I’ve always seen it through a feminist lens and wanted to be more able to access my supposedly patriarchy-suppressed ambition. But also, I could be really happy doing creative projects with friends that go no where??? I’m more comfortable with ambition that isn’t career-related. My ambitions are to be happy, to build secure relationships with my family, to build community, to name a few.
😂 Right?!? I mean, sometimes I get it. I grew up in a farm and there is a lot of work and little money, but sometimes you really have to unlearn that attitude.
Most of the ambitions I had at various points in my life (I'm 53 now) were ones that were just part of the dominant paradigms around me and that I just kind of accepted that I would take on. Get good grades. Get into and graduate from a good college. Get a steady office job. Get a masters degree. Get a better steady office job. Find your person and eventually marry them and have kids. Buy a house. Buy a bigger house. Keep moving up the job ladder (or not if you want to spend more time with said kids) until you're ready to retire.
I did some of those - got the masters, bought a house. Jobs weren't steady till about 16 years ago when I landed at my now-current employer and decided that I liked the place well enough to stick it out through the frustrating times and climb the career ladder here. Found my person but he had no interest in kids and I realized when I looked deeper at it, I was always ambivalent about having them (which seems like a good reason NOT to have them). Neither of us really felt strongly about getting married, so we're still together and unmarried 19 years later. We might get married for purely practical reasons at some point, especially as we get older and financial / legal / medical stuff is just simpler with that piece of paper.
And somewhere along the line in the last 16 years I acknowledged that my true ambition was to retire, early. And I made a few conscious decisions and a lot of unconscious ones that has made that possible for me to retire at 53, effective July 5. I will not have to work again if I don't choose to, and I've been telling everyone who asks "So what are you going to do when you retire?" that "I'm going to figure out what I want to be when I grow up!" And I am. After said person and I move across the country so we can be closer to my family (his is pretty scattered and mine all live relatively close to each other in an area of the country I like and that enables us to have a lower cost of living, crucial to pulling off this early retirement thing).
I still have an unspoken ambition to find a passion and do something with it, but I am also in desperate need of some time to just untangle my brain from the day to day grind of capitalism and working primarily for financial security, and the day to day grind of doing well at a job that I am good at, that had some meaning, but was never ever something I was passionate about. So it might be a while before I find that passion project, but I'm looking forward to eventually having the brain / heart space to do that with the immense privilege and security of doing that without worrying too much about money.
It’s cool to hear from someone who is long term partnered but not married! I would actually be really interested in a marriage thread just because I don’t really feel pulled to it (but my partner does).
I want to sell my art. I want to have it in galleries. I want people to collect it. I want to create large scale installation work. I want to fire a massive sculpture in a train or car kiln. I want to delve deeper into atmospheric firing and develop a body of work for wood and soda kilns.
I want. I want. I WANT.
For so long I didn’t let myself want anything. I was broke. I was doing unpaid carework. I didn’t have support. I am mostly still broke! And doing unpaid carework. And lacking in physical support! I am still disabled - maybe even more disabled! But I’m not depressed anymore, and now I WANT.
I work in special education, and one of the only avenues for me to “rise through the ranks” would be working as a supervisor or administrator. I have no interest in that and am happy in my role as very competent underling.
I had a very stressful job managing an overloaded team at a nonprofit and left it to become a very competent underling elsewhere. So far it’s been great!
These days my professional ambitions have flaked off to simply “do I want more than where I am now?” Do I want to manage more people, make more consequential decisions? Yes, for now I still do, so away I go. I want to run shit.
Any pretensions I once had to achieve a straight and narrow personal life died when I didn’t get married before I was 30. The calendar year leading up to that birthday was way stressful as it became increasingly clear that I wouldn’t get married within the next 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 month. But then my birthday hit and I felt free. I had missed that boat and lost any external direction but now I could build a life based only on what I want.
I'm pro-ambition if (big if) you can isolate your ambition so it does not have a competitive element. And if you can do that, please tell me how!
Seriously, it's not my ambitious side I want to vanquish, as it feels relatively benign, my ambition at this point being: do your best, be kind to yourself when you fall short. (Works for work and parenting. And friendship.)
But whenever, if ever you feel yourself comparing yourself to others, try to put the brakes on. It's tempting to think of success as a zero-sum game, but it's not constructive. When you see someone else achieving exactly what you hope to achieve, say to yourself: "Good for them." Even if -- this is the hardest part -- they're a total stinker who doesn't deserve it. And then: "If they can do it, then maybe I can, too."
I am a romance novel devotee so I’ll have to listen to the culture study link! I love reading romance!
I feel like I am most ambitious about the non work things in my life. Certainly, I want to do well at work and earn more money because the world is SO expensive. And if I want the chance to have a kid in my 30s, I’ve gotta increase my income somehow. But what I’m really chasing after is family, relationships, community - not the work in itself. I’m also very ambitious about my hobbies, like reading and knitting. I am always seeking new books to read and planing new projects to knit. I have a busy project schedule that involves gradually turning my wardrobe into a knitwear-forward space. And I love the challenge of changing things in a pattern to make it fit my specific body better. So those are areas where my ambitions really seem to come out.
In my life there are a lot of college students. There are a lot of ambitions and a lot of dangers. I want to see ambition through a capitalist or patriarchal or a not-so-healthy lens because all of those apply to me and my life. However, when you're 18, don't have a lot of resources and maybe your family isn't 100% supportive/loving, ambition is an extremely powerful force. I've seen it save people from fdrug abuse, pull single mothers out of poverty and give hope to people brain damaged after a car crash. It's definitely a huge privilege (which I have) to be able to let go of ambition and not fall down a deadly rabbit hole as a result.
I apologize in advance for such a long post. I wanted and I (think) still want to be an EIC. And I feel sad giving it up and then also guilt after reading about the "Real Editors in Chief" culture you described, completely and horribly toxic, and I love the life you describe as your present life. But it just occurred to me this morning as I was reading your newsletter, that you are an EIC of your own making, on your own terms. As the head of a [small, as you describe it] media company, maybe you are a modern and better EIC? You are writing, editing, dreaming, collaborating. You are supportive of others who do the same. You are thinking of new projects. I guess the reason I'm commenting is that I feel inspired. I am excited to think that my vision of being a writer or editor, or EIC, could be me surrounding myself with all kinds of media and awesome writers and creators, putting my own thoughts and words together (aka writing). I’m mulling this over in my head as I struggle with being a grown up. I'm curious about your thoughts.
I don’t think of myself as ambitious because it is absolutely tied up in capitalist forms of labor for me! Much like I don’t want to use “circle back” outside of emails, ambition just feels too tied to something that does not nourish me, that is a necessary evil. I try not to feel utterly antagonist towards my 9-5 because that’s exhausting, but there will always be that part of me that is angry we’ve tied everything to this.
But I love setting intentions and creating plans. I do a yearly reflection with my best friend in December, and we talk about our dreams for the year ahead (this year: to move out of the place my partner and I rented before the pandemic, to be able to hold a conversation in Mandarin). I like to orient myself towards what I value.
Ambition, for me, is whether I am moving in the direction of my values. One of my values is empowering people, especially women, in my rather cutthroat industry (intersection of law and finance). So I do want to keep moving forward and manage more people because I think I am good at it and it aligns with these values. But I gave up on the traditional metrics of “success” (more billable hours, more clients, partner track) when I had my daughter in April 2020. The only thing that mattered was taking care of her and keeping her safe, which meant that I took a very long time away from working at all (a lot of privilege allowed me to do that and I also spent down my savings which meant I needed to go back). When I came back, I was a totally different person with new ambitions. And I like her a lot.
I'm realizing I never had a vision of "ultimate success." I came from very very little (but a load of social/behavioral/performative strictures). As far back as I can remember (I'll be 40 this year), my dreams have been centered in doing something that I found meaningful. As a kid it was being a veterinarian and having horses (spoiler, neither ever happened). As time went on, it was being a master gardener, teaching outdoor education and showing people how to draw as a way to connect with place, nature, and self. Then, it was keeping a community newspaper alive, learning French in situ, and helping Francophones accomplish things they wanted to in English. Then, it was writing essays and being a freelance writer, then moving into academia because there was a slim corner where I could put *all that* together with a focus on training/studying scientists trying to share science beyond academia. In every stage until now, I've struggled to make ends meet. Always, I've been deeply involved with how one or more non-profit organizations were running (and getting better at running). No amount of work ever seemed like enough to make all the change we were trying to make. Right now, I finally feel like all my expertise and passion is on the table. I've never had a job that paid better or suited better. And success still looks like making my organization better for people who work at it, study here, and/or interface with it. Money or status were never my ambitions. But, now, I've realized that those things can make some of the systems change work I aim for at least a bit more possible. So, I'm pondering how to share that awareness with others. (Like, the high-stakes work of professional, persuasive writing -- whether it's emails or grants or schmoozy pitches to a high-ranking administrator -- can be coin of the realm. How do we coach junior colleagues and trainees to develop that skill, and the skills of collective action and trust-building, of even believing change is posssible and envisioning the slog and policies/procedures we need to change, so we keep building toward "rising tides, together we rise"!?! Building that kind of training and peer support is my ambition right now. *That* and keeping a balance with enough rest and enough humility to remember "no one can do all this alone, so don't try." Otherwise, I've burnt myself out with every previous passion phase of my career. And then changed totally to new fields. (Partially due to ADHD I was diagnosed with at 36.) As I've written about on my blog a lot this spring, I don't want to change focus. So, part of my ambition is to sustain some balance, which is acutely difficult for me.
This is very thought provoking. Ambition has always puzzled be because I don’t have it. But, and this sounds awful but it’s true - I hold a very high opinion of my own skills, which has (luckily?) been basically validated my whole life. But I’m 43 and I still don’t really know if the success I’ve had has any point? I mean, I don’t know that “the world” would consider me successful. I’m not know to many people (let alone having 54k subscribers?). I definitely consider myself successful, but then I wonder - is that extremely arrogant? So then I feel compelled to do more and more and more, but it’s not exactly ambition it’s more like a duty. Like, okay I am good at math and languages and gift buying so I can never sit down and rest because I can execute this complicated life better than others. Do I have a duty to do that? Because it’s easy for me? See for me duty and ambition and success are super complicated. I would NOT count myself a feminist, I find the term complex, contradictory, on too many levels, and yet I feel I need to live my own achievements very publicly to show it can be done? It’s all very confusing.
I relate to this, thank you for sharing. Maybe a few times a month someone will make a comment about how I should be doing more with my life because I am so smart or privileged or whatever (I just went to college and had good grades, not Einstein here by any means). So there is like this pressure of duty that if you're "smart" you need to fulfilling. I've let go of it for myself so I find these comments odd now, but definitely there is something there.
My toxic ambition was I wanted to get married (to a man) and be a SAHM. Toxic for me (no judgement on anyone else!) because it caused me so much angst and heartbreak and grief. Sort of a joke, but true: I used to say I'm slightly too smart to settle for a bad relationship, but not smart enough to attract a good one.
Too late now!
I did a bunch of things I thought would help me get married (LOL forevah): pursued some career stuff, got a PhD, moved across the country once or twice... now my main ambition is to somehow??? save enough that I can eventually retire and have some years free of working for survival before I die.
It has taken me a long, long time to separate the temporary "win" of academic or professional achievement from the longer lasting glow of things that actually matter. For me, the problem with all the career hoops (giving presentations, writing papers, applying for prestigious Things) is that the drug hit of success is so fleeting. You give a paper and get some good feedback and feel "oh maybe I belong and am making a difference" and then you go back home and stare at the bookshelves that are overflowing while your womb is still empty. One day I was staring at the bundle of published papers on a shelf in my office and I thought "are these going to comfort me when I'm old?" For me the answer was no, not really.
So idk... so much of success is luck, and that's something ambition doesn't take into account.
(coda: I'm happy being single and I'm at peace with not having children, it's just how it worked out for me, so I'm working on finding the next path).
Recovering perfectionist/people pleaser here. I think what I’ve sussed out for myself is this:
Do I want to do this thing because it’s what *I* want to do, and deep down in my body it feels good and right for me?
Or
Am I doing this because of how I want to be perceived by others/as a hustle for my worth?
I’m very new at this whole “what do *I* want out of my life” thing and it has required lots of therapy and meditation, but it has also WORKED! Ambition doesn’t feel like the right word to me when it’s coming from the deep down place. The goals that come from there might take hard work but they do NOT require me to convince myself that it’s what I want.
Ambition is merely a tool that helps us to achieve greater goals. It is only "good" in so far as our goals are worthy, and goals can be righteous, neutral, or downright evil. Some of the most ignominious people in history were great achievers, after all.
My [non-]"toxic ambition" is to earn enough money to purchase a house with a view by the time I retire. That feels like a neutral goal to me. But I would like to earn that money by writing novels that empower my generation and the next. And that feels like a 'good' goal to throw my ambition behind.
This is a great reframe. I work in a field where people are super ambitious and their ambition makes me want to read novels at the office. In protest.
Oh man, ambition. What a topic. I had undiagnosed ADHD and didn’t get that diagnosis until I was 33 (and only because I was in the process of supporting and advocating for my daughter’s diagnosis — a common thread among women diagnosed later in life). Before that, I had resigned myself to always being sort of… stuck. Everything was too hard except the things that I was already good at (or passionate enough about to risk repeated failure). So I told myself I didn’t really have any ambitions. Which became true! I don’t know what changed — I think going on meds and realizing I wasn’t actually a complete failure as a human being (that I literally had a medical condition that made life hard!!) certainly helped. Having some perspective about what I want to be doing with my life also helped (building and contributing positively to communities I care about and belong to). And letting go of the imaginary person I thought I was — whoever she was, either superstar or abject failure — helped get me back to being, well, a person in the world who sets goals and does stuff. It’s nice once you get to the realization that we are supposed to change as we grow. :)
I feel this. I, too, started to suspect I have some kind of neurodiverse flavor after my daughter was diagnosed, and I have felt either intensely engaged or stuck for so many years with my job (teaching). That stuck feeling is so hard. For a lot of years, I chalked it up to laziness because I was raised in the rural Midwest where no one ever rests, but now I’m starting to see those stuck periods as just parts of my brain.
As for ambition, I’m intensely uncomfortable with that word. I’ve always seen it as something I don’t have “enough” of. I’ve always seen it through a feminist lens and wanted to be more able to access my supposedly patriarchy-suppressed ambition. But also, I could be really happy doing creative projects with friends that go no where??? I’m more comfortable with ambition that isn’t career-related. My ambitions are to be happy, to build secure relationships with my family, to build community, to name a few.
I too live in the rural Midwest and we wear our exhaustion like a badge of honor.
😂 Right?!? I mean, sometimes I get it. I grew up in a farm and there is a lot of work and little money, but sometimes you really have to unlearn that attitude.
Most of the ambitions I had at various points in my life (I'm 53 now) were ones that were just part of the dominant paradigms around me and that I just kind of accepted that I would take on. Get good grades. Get into and graduate from a good college. Get a steady office job. Get a masters degree. Get a better steady office job. Find your person and eventually marry them and have kids. Buy a house. Buy a bigger house. Keep moving up the job ladder (or not if you want to spend more time with said kids) until you're ready to retire.
I did some of those - got the masters, bought a house. Jobs weren't steady till about 16 years ago when I landed at my now-current employer and decided that I liked the place well enough to stick it out through the frustrating times and climb the career ladder here. Found my person but he had no interest in kids and I realized when I looked deeper at it, I was always ambivalent about having them (which seems like a good reason NOT to have them). Neither of us really felt strongly about getting married, so we're still together and unmarried 19 years later. We might get married for purely practical reasons at some point, especially as we get older and financial / legal / medical stuff is just simpler with that piece of paper.
And somewhere along the line in the last 16 years I acknowledged that my true ambition was to retire, early. And I made a few conscious decisions and a lot of unconscious ones that has made that possible for me to retire at 53, effective July 5. I will not have to work again if I don't choose to, and I've been telling everyone who asks "So what are you going to do when you retire?" that "I'm going to figure out what I want to be when I grow up!" And I am. After said person and I move across the country so we can be closer to my family (his is pretty scattered and mine all live relatively close to each other in an area of the country I like and that enables us to have a lower cost of living, crucial to pulling off this early retirement thing).
I still have an unspoken ambition to find a passion and do something with it, but I am also in desperate need of some time to just untangle my brain from the day to day grind of capitalism and working primarily for financial security, and the day to day grind of doing well at a job that I am good at, that had some meaning, but was never ever something I was passionate about. So it might be a while before I find that passion project, but I'm looking forward to eventually having the brain / heart space to do that with the immense privilege and security of doing that without worrying too much about money.
congratulations on your upcoming retirement from forced paid work. i LOVE the framing of having time to figure out what you want now. LOVE IT.
It’s cool to hear from someone who is long term partnered but not married! I would actually be really interested in a marriage thread just because I don’t really feel pulled to it (but my partner does).
I would happily participate in that thread!
This is amazing! Kudos to you on getting to this place.
I want to sell my art. I want to have it in galleries. I want people to collect it. I want to create large scale installation work. I want to fire a massive sculpture in a train or car kiln. I want to delve deeper into atmospheric firing and develop a body of work for wood and soda kilns.
I want. I want. I WANT.
For so long I didn’t let myself want anything. I was broke. I was doing unpaid carework. I didn’t have support. I am mostly still broke! And doing unpaid carework. And lacking in physical support! I am still disabled - maybe even more disabled! But I’m not depressed anymore, and now I WANT.
Amen!
I work in special education, and one of the only avenues for me to “rise through the ranks” would be working as a supervisor or administrator. I have no interest in that and am happy in my role as very competent underling.
I had a very stressful job managing an overloaded team at a nonprofit and left it to become a very competent underling elsewhere. So far it’s been great!
I’m glad your new role is less stressful for you 😎
I am with you here!
These days my professional ambitions have flaked off to simply “do I want more than where I am now?” Do I want to manage more people, make more consequential decisions? Yes, for now I still do, so away I go. I want to run shit.
Any pretensions I once had to achieve a straight and narrow personal life died when I didn’t get married before I was 30. The calendar year leading up to that birthday was way stressful as it became increasingly clear that I wouldn’t get married within the next 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 month. But then my birthday hit and I felt free. I had missed that boat and lost any external direction but now I could build a life based only on what I want.
I'm pro-ambition if (big if) you can isolate your ambition so it does not have a competitive element. And if you can do that, please tell me how!
Seriously, it's not my ambitious side I want to vanquish, as it feels relatively benign, my ambition at this point being: do your best, be kind to yourself when you fall short. (Works for work and parenting. And friendship.)
But whenever, if ever you feel yourself comparing yourself to others, try to put the brakes on. It's tempting to think of success as a zero-sum game, but it's not constructive. When you see someone else achieving exactly what you hope to achieve, say to yourself: "Good for them." Even if -- this is the hardest part -- they're a total stinker who doesn't deserve it. And then: "If they can do it, then maybe I can, too."
Oh yes, such an important distinction! Ambition and competition do NOT have to walk together!
I am a romance novel devotee so I’ll have to listen to the culture study link! I love reading romance!
I feel like I am most ambitious about the non work things in my life. Certainly, I want to do well at work and earn more money because the world is SO expensive. And if I want the chance to have a kid in my 30s, I’ve gotta increase my income somehow. But what I’m really chasing after is family, relationships, community - not the work in itself. I’m also very ambitious about my hobbies, like reading and knitting. I am always seeking new books to read and planing new projects to knit. I have a busy project schedule that involves gradually turning my wardrobe into a knitwear-forward space. And I love the challenge of changing things in a pattern to make it fit my specific body better. So those are areas where my ambitions really seem to come out.
In my life there are a lot of college students. There are a lot of ambitions and a lot of dangers. I want to see ambition through a capitalist or patriarchal or a not-so-healthy lens because all of those apply to me and my life. However, when you're 18, don't have a lot of resources and maybe your family isn't 100% supportive/loving, ambition is an extremely powerful force. I've seen it save people from fdrug abuse, pull single mothers out of poverty and give hope to people brain damaged after a car crash. It's definitely a huge privilege (which I have) to be able to let go of ambition and not fall down a deadly rabbit hole as a result.
I apologize in advance for such a long post. I wanted and I (think) still want to be an EIC. And I feel sad giving it up and then also guilt after reading about the "Real Editors in Chief" culture you described, completely and horribly toxic, and I love the life you describe as your present life. But it just occurred to me this morning as I was reading your newsletter, that you are an EIC of your own making, on your own terms. As the head of a [small, as you describe it] media company, maybe you are a modern and better EIC? You are writing, editing, dreaming, collaborating. You are supportive of others who do the same. You are thinking of new projects. I guess the reason I'm commenting is that I feel inspired. I am excited to think that my vision of being a writer or editor, or EIC, could be me surrounding myself with all kinds of media and awesome writers and creators, putting my own thoughts and words together (aka writing). I’m mulling this over in my head as I struggle with being a grown up. I'm curious about your thoughts.
I don’t think of myself as ambitious because it is absolutely tied up in capitalist forms of labor for me! Much like I don’t want to use “circle back” outside of emails, ambition just feels too tied to something that does not nourish me, that is a necessary evil. I try not to feel utterly antagonist towards my 9-5 because that’s exhausting, but there will always be that part of me that is angry we’ve tied everything to this.
But I love setting intentions and creating plans. I do a yearly reflection with my best friend in December, and we talk about our dreams for the year ahead (this year: to move out of the place my partner and I rented before the pandemic, to be able to hold a conversation in Mandarin). I like to orient myself towards what I value.
I love the yearly reflection with your best friend. That's really lovely.
Thank you! I really treasure it.
Ambition, for me, is whether I am moving in the direction of my values. One of my values is empowering people, especially women, in my rather cutthroat industry (intersection of law and finance). So I do want to keep moving forward and manage more people because I think I am good at it and it aligns with these values. But I gave up on the traditional metrics of “success” (more billable hours, more clients, partner track) when I had my daughter in April 2020. The only thing that mattered was taking care of her and keeping her safe, which meant that I took a very long time away from working at all (a lot of privilege allowed me to do that and I also spent down my savings which meant I needed to go back). When I came back, I was a totally different person with new ambitions. And I like her a lot.
I'm realizing I never had a vision of "ultimate success." I came from very very little (but a load of social/behavioral/performative strictures). As far back as I can remember (I'll be 40 this year), my dreams have been centered in doing something that I found meaningful. As a kid it was being a veterinarian and having horses (spoiler, neither ever happened). As time went on, it was being a master gardener, teaching outdoor education and showing people how to draw as a way to connect with place, nature, and self. Then, it was keeping a community newspaper alive, learning French in situ, and helping Francophones accomplish things they wanted to in English. Then, it was writing essays and being a freelance writer, then moving into academia because there was a slim corner where I could put *all that* together with a focus on training/studying scientists trying to share science beyond academia. In every stage until now, I've struggled to make ends meet. Always, I've been deeply involved with how one or more non-profit organizations were running (and getting better at running). No amount of work ever seemed like enough to make all the change we were trying to make. Right now, I finally feel like all my expertise and passion is on the table. I've never had a job that paid better or suited better. And success still looks like making my organization better for people who work at it, study here, and/or interface with it. Money or status were never my ambitions. But, now, I've realized that those things can make some of the systems change work I aim for at least a bit more possible. So, I'm pondering how to share that awareness with others. (Like, the high-stakes work of professional, persuasive writing -- whether it's emails or grants or schmoozy pitches to a high-ranking administrator -- can be coin of the realm. How do we coach junior colleagues and trainees to develop that skill, and the skills of collective action and trust-building, of even believing change is posssible and envisioning the slog and policies/procedures we need to change, so we keep building toward "rising tides, together we rise"!?! Building that kind of training and peer support is my ambition right now. *That* and keeping a balance with enough rest and enough humility to remember "no one can do all this alone, so don't try." Otherwise, I've burnt myself out with every previous passion phase of my career. And then changed totally to new fields. (Partially due to ADHD I was diagnosed with at 36.) As I've written about on my blog a lot this spring, I don't want to change focus. So, part of my ambition is to sustain some balance, which is acutely difficult for me.
This is very thought provoking. Ambition has always puzzled be because I don’t have it. But, and this sounds awful but it’s true - I hold a very high opinion of my own skills, which has (luckily?) been basically validated my whole life. But I’m 43 and I still don’t really know if the success I’ve had has any point? I mean, I don’t know that “the world” would consider me successful. I’m not know to many people (let alone having 54k subscribers?). I definitely consider myself successful, but then I wonder - is that extremely arrogant? So then I feel compelled to do more and more and more, but it’s not exactly ambition it’s more like a duty. Like, okay I am good at math and languages and gift buying so I can never sit down and rest because I can execute this complicated life better than others. Do I have a duty to do that? Because it’s easy for me? See for me duty and ambition and success are super complicated. I would NOT count myself a feminist, I find the term complex, contradictory, on too many levels, and yet I feel I need to live my own achievements very publicly to show it can be done? It’s all very confusing.
I relate to this, thank you for sharing. Maybe a few times a month someone will make a comment about how I should be doing more with my life because I am so smart or privileged or whatever (I just went to college and had good grades, not Einstein here by any means). So there is like this pressure of duty that if you're "smart" you need to fulfilling. I've let go of it for myself so I find these comments odd now, but definitely there is something there.
My toxic ambition was I wanted to get married (to a man) and be a SAHM. Toxic for me (no judgement on anyone else!) because it caused me so much angst and heartbreak and grief. Sort of a joke, but true: I used to say I'm slightly too smart to settle for a bad relationship, but not smart enough to attract a good one.
Too late now!
I did a bunch of things I thought would help me get married (LOL forevah): pursued some career stuff, got a PhD, moved across the country once or twice... now my main ambition is to somehow??? save enough that I can eventually retire and have some years free of working for survival before I die.
It has taken me a long, long time to separate the temporary "win" of academic or professional achievement from the longer lasting glow of things that actually matter. For me, the problem with all the career hoops (giving presentations, writing papers, applying for prestigious Things) is that the drug hit of success is so fleeting. You give a paper and get some good feedback and feel "oh maybe I belong and am making a difference" and then you go back home and stare at the bookshelves that are overflowing while your womb is still empty. One day I was staring at the bundle of published papers on a shelf in my office and I thought "are these going to comfort me when I'm old?" For me the answer was no, not really.
So idk... so much of success is luck, and that's something ambition doesn't take into account.
(coda: I'm happy being single and I'm at peace with not having children, it's just how it worked out for me, so I'm working on finding the next path).