Essay #2 on Success — Exploring the power of Ambition and how it impacts your life experience.
“Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done.” — David Goggins.
At 19, I used to dream of getting assassinated at 40 in front of a million people. It may sound ridiculous, but I saw it as a powerful idea and the influence I could have on the world. By 25, I let go of this outlandish dream for something more accessible — to be a CEO. People close to me know my goals; I take pride in talking about them. I am 39 today. Friends and family tell me I am destined to do great things.
Although, I don’t want to do great things anymore. Having powered through every bit of pain — mind and body, and sufficiently materially rewarded, I have found Ambition to be an endless pit or a slow poison sapping away critical life force.
Define Ambition: An eager desire for social standing, fame, or power. OR A desire to achieve a particular goal; aspiration
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. Ambition provides a drive — a potent catalyst unlike anything else. It keeps you up, making you want more. It finds weaknesses in you, and you persist in tweaking and fixing them. It keeps you hungry — literally and figuratively. It can make you feel it is okay to compromise your values to reach your goal. It does not accept anything less than the original dream.
I used to be frustrated at people who lacked Ambition. I’d never consider them for teams that I built. I’d expect no less of anyone around me — friends, families, or foes. To be ambitious meant that if I was not playing at the intensity of a final match and winning, I could not enjoy a game of football or basketball. I still can’t, and I am not okay with losing.
Ambition is a cage match (borrowing a wrestling idea) — a space where it’s you versus you. YouTube and Instagram algorithms have become referees in this match-up, constantly pitting you against friends and random strangers. A picture of a friend meeting your hero, a productivity guru claiming how he changed his life from the verge of suicide, or a workout influencer flexing her lifting skills — all of which make you feel a little lesser with every scroll.
Especially according to influencers or your successful friends, nothing seems impossible; only perseverance and perspiration are gospel. Beginning with Tim Ferris and David Goggins, I discovered Mel Robbins, Naval Ravikant, and many others. At the altar of achievement, these priests preach an ultimate truth — It’s you that limits you. And, you repent at the altar of achievement as if your fault is your incompetence.
You know that feeling! Nothing but you are the only limit to your success. It makes you want to fight like a fish out of water, wondering when your legs will sprout so you can get up and run.
Byung Chul Han, a Korean-German philosopher, discusses how the world has become an Achievement Society. He identifies modern society as a world of excess positivity, obsessed with achievement and performance — a world of individuals in infinite pursuit of performance — a caged hamster on its private little wheel. What is expected of us here? To extract our maximum self and nothing less to exhaustion and then some. To get off this expressway means failure, weakness, and inferiority.
Our heroes are improbable goals we set for ourselves. Our immediate worlds — family, society, and work — expect nothing less than magic from us. OKRs at work and in life are unavoidable. Ambition is a minimum expectation in our world, creeping silently into our lives and influencing us in discrete ways.
- A woman would not commit to a man without Ambition.
- Winners and goal scorers are celebrated; losers and second-placed are forgotten.
- A woman cannot choose for herself anything less than what a man can achieve.
- Alumni events are places to be dreaded, where accomplishments are taken stock of and ranked.
- To be the youngest partner, VP, CXO, or Forbes 30 Under 30
- Parents celebrate scores and ranks, give ice cream treats, and throw parties; an average day is nothing to be proud of.
- Vacations are competitions between families — who had the better one, whose pictures got more likes.
- Children are racehorses, bred to live the unlived dreams of their parents.
“Nothing offends a man of our day and our race more than to tell him that he is not original, that he is weak-willed, has no particular talents, and is an ordinary person”. — Russian writer Dostoevsky
To be ambitious is a particularly tortuous experience. To believe that we must endure extreme suffering in the pursuit to be better than another is much like being crucified next to Christ without the depth of purpose and meaning Christ lived by. The ambitious suffer through pointless journies, postponing happiness and love, not liking any end, and enduring purposeless suffering. Every day that we suffer makes us want to jump off this ship, and we end each day unable to.
And then there are days when we are burnt out from all the expectations and from pushing ourselves to the limits. Days when tears and sweat have drained, and pure nothingness pervades us. And no one around us understands the truth of our wretched existence — pondering the sheer hopelessness of another day of this.
“When ambition and aspiration take over, ambition is about having more than what our siblings have. Fairness is about having at least what our siblings have. We see ourselves alone, separate from those around us. The other is opportunity or threat. The self wants to overpower threats and consume opportunity. The self wants to live at the cost of the other.” — Devdutt Patnaik, Garuda Purana & Other Hindu ideas on death, rebirth and immortality (Pg 11)
When the poison of ambition and infinite seeking becomes our only reality — and I pray that day may not come for you — I pray that on that day, you can find the antidote — PURPOSE. And so, as dark as it may seem, the answer is not another David Goggins video telling you that you are not doing enough after having sweat blood and nursing a defeated self. The answer lies in an act of kindness to ourselves: re-examining our drivers and reflecting on what this finite journey of life means uniquely to us.
Organizational Psychologist Adam Grant says this about purpose: “Happiness is not about reaching your goals. It’s about aligning your goals with your values. Progress without purpose is empty. Achievement without impact is fleeting. Success is most rewarding when it serves the people and principles that matter to you.”
This was part one of my essay exploring Ambition. In part two, I explore the antidote — Purpose.
References:
- A note on The Idiot by Dostoevsky
- Painting by Katsushika Hokusai Japanese ca. 1830–32: Fujimigahara in Owari Province (Bishū Fujimigahara), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji
- GARUDA PURANA AND OTHER HINDU IDEAS OF DEATH, REBIRTH AND IMMORTALITY by Devdutt Pattnaik —
