The Origin of Ambition
Ambition has long been an important force in my life, and I’ve always wondered about its origins. Ambition determines if a young child will grow up to become a Steve Jobs, or a Barack Obama, or a Michael Phelps. And yet, to my knowledge there is no prevailing understanding of where ambition comes from, why some people seem to have it in excess and others do not.
Why do some kids become intent on acing all their classes sometime during elementary and middle school? Why do some become laser focused on getting into the top university, or becoming the captain of their sports team, or the leader of their community?
I recently thought up three simple theories on the origins of ambition and ran them past some of the most ambitious people I know. These theories were:
1) Imprinting: ambitious kids see their parents behaving ambitiously, or at least striving and working very hard, and want to follow suit.
2) Expectation: the parents of ambitious children expect their kids to be the best, and instill in them the belief that they deserve to be the best.
3) Positive reinforcement & addiction: Ambitious children experience the thrill of being the best at something (or many somethings) early on in their lives, get addicted to that feeling, and forever continue to seek it thereafter.
Among participants in my informal survey, some support was voiced for theories #1 and #2, but overwhelmingly, people (including myself) chose #3 as the most important factor.
This is a surprising and shocking conclusion: Ambition, this magical factor that determines the course of so many lives, is no more or less than an addiction.
Sometime before the age of 12, the most ambitious kids have seen with their own eyes that they have the potential to be not just good, but the very best. Let’s call this moment (or collection of moments) the “trigger.” After a trigger, teachers reinforce it, parents encourage it, and suddenly these kids have internalized the idea that they are not just top quartile or decile, but a member of an abstract elite: the winners.
Speak with a few of the most ambitious people you know, and I suspect that each will recount a “trigger” story from their childhood: winning the class spelling bee 15 weeks in a row, getting so good at math games that their teacher makes them stop playing so others don’t get discouraged, etc.
From that point on, there is a carrot and stick effect: continued success reinforces the social and psychological thrill of being the best, while the prospect of no longer winning becomes an unacceptable threat to the child’s understanding of self. Plus, as with any addiction, the child eventually no longer feels satisfied with their previous level of success; either because the other kids catch up, or because they meet kids who raise the stakes of the competition. And so, the child has little choice but to seek greater and greater success.
This cycle of seeking increasing success — to preserve one’s sense of self and maintain the thrill of social supremacy — is the syndrome that the outside world observes and labels as “ambition.”
To highlight the importance of this insight, let me ask you a simple question: do the most ambitious people choose to be that way? I hope I have shown here that the answer to that question is far more complicated than most people would think.
This realization also has huge ramifications on how parents might raise ambitious children. Prevailing wisdom of the moment suggests that you let your kids discover their own interests on their own time… Well, not if their understanding of themselves within the social hierarchy will be cemented by puberty. Instead, if you want to rear an ambitious child, the recipe may be to train them to be so good at some objective skill at a young age that they will get a taste of what it means to win.
If that idea makes you uneasy, then you’re not the only one. I’ll close with the obvious moral concern here: Is ambition an addiction worth having? Does it lead to happiness, or to a life focused on the wrong values? And if it is an addiction that parents really can help instill at a young age, then is it moral to do so? For now, I leave those questions to you.
