Ambition or obsession: where do we draw the line?

During our life, we are taught that those who are ambitious in life have it all and that its opposite — the lazy comforted ones — are never as successful. I have always seen myself as an ambitious person: all I did was think about my next steps in life, where I would want to be in a month, in a year, in a decade. My day to day life was always shaped in order to make my dream life a reality. But, shouldn’t reality be right here and right now?

As I was swimming in the middle of the mediterranean sea in a small Mallorquian village called Alcudia, I was wondering where I would be next month, and just how much I wished to be in Milan. As the waves came to bring me back to reality, I started hating all those future thoughts. I was in paradise, as I had dreamed for so long, and still, wishing to be somewhere else, as if this wasn’t successful enough. I was exactly where I wanted to be years ago and still feeling unfulfilled because things were missing. How ungrateful.

Ambition can be the best fuel for getting our life together and building beautiful things for ourselves, but it’s one fine line from obsession. To want to have it all is nice but that thought alone can make you miserable if you’re not able to appreciate what you have already built. Ambition got me living my dream life, obsession made me blind to it. Ambition makes a man, but obsession can quite literally destroy it.