Ambition

I’ve been thinking about ambition. We have a mixed relationship with this word. It can be equated with aggressiveness and arrogance, but also purpose, success and drive. For me, personally, you can call me ambitious any day, I take it as a compliment. It means I care about what I do and that I’m striving to achieve something. Some people think ambition means that you’re never satisfied. Maybe. And my sister, now in her early sixties, is asking about how to turn it off.

Whether you have a little or a lot, all the research, including my own, shows it’s essential to career success. The management and psychology literature describes it as a personality trait, something innate, that indicates your future, or explains your past.

Ambition does quite a lot of things, the first among them is to drive you to want more: a challenge you can work toward and achieve with a lot of hard work. If it’s easy, it’s not that ambitious. Second, it helps you believe that you can do the thing that you desire, no matter how hard or out of reach it may seem. Ambitious people often read inspiring stories of people who did something big, or listen to podcast like How I Built This. It generates motivation. Third, ambition gives you the energy to get up get going, keep going, shift and adapt. And finally, ambition gets you to do it all over again with a new challenge, probably something that builds on the last one in some way.

My question is, can you learn ambition? Can you develop it? You definitely need it if you want to get somewhere.