Types of ambition and what to do about them
It’s a known fact that to achieve anything significant in life, you have to be ambitious.
However, what people often dont talk about is what kind of ambitious.
I’ve found it useful to categorize ambition into two types: General and Specific
General Ambition
I want to be great
is an example of general ambition. It doesn’t mention great at what. Just great.
What does great mean then?
If you uncover this desire further, it is more likely that it is related to wealth, fame or power.
Hence, this is a very outcome-based desire1.
Where does it come from?
Mimesis
Most general ambition comes from looking at other successful people. Successful people have at least one of wealth, money and power, and a lot of that flows into your desire.
Unchannelled energy
A lot of people have high energy within them to do something. And no, I’m not associating this with the extraversion sort of energy. It’s actually more within, that only the person feels but can’t come out so well. They want to put that energy somewhere, but just don’t know where to put their energy in. This lack of direction often manifests as general ambition.
This brings us to..
Specific ambition
I want to be a great writer
I want to be a great entrepreneur / teacher / engineer ….
Here, you are not basing your ambition on completely outcome based things. In fact, the beauty of specific ambition is that it orients yourself away from the outcome and to the process. To become a great writer, you will have to master all elements of writing well. Similarly for any other role you want to be great at. And the process results in some sort of pursuit of excellence in that domain.
Where does that come from?
It comes from trying out things, finding what you like and then having a strong desire to be great at it.
It might even start from mimesis - you see some great worker in a field and decide to also be great in the field. However, this has to be reinforced once you actually enter the field and spend some time in it. E.g. you may read Hemingway and want to write as great as he does, but if you actually dont do a lot of writing, you won’t even know if you’re passionate enough to go for that greatness.
Unfulfilled ambition
Since general ambition is related to outcomes, unfulfilled ambition here generally means that you aren’t successful by conventional definitions.
This is a dangerous territory - you will blame yourself / your circumstances for not being successful, ultimately resulting in a bitter person yourself. And that bitterness will perpetuate the problem of not finding a way to achieve what you want.
Unfulfilled specific ambition is a bit vague. Firstly, because you are assigning a role to your ambition, you can also define the way you define great in that role. E.g. A great writer could mean a best-selling author or a niche writer who has a small but very strong following or just someone who thinks very very clearly by writing. I know a lot of great writers, who dont have best-selling books. But that doesn’t mean they are not great.
In fact, this is very common in the history of arts. Fitzgerald mostly became famous after he died and so did Van Gogh, Bach, Kafka.
The question ultimately becomes what is greatness for you in that field?
There is such room for fuzziness in arts.
However, there is less fuzziness in more commercial endeavors. E.g. A great investor has to be judged by how much money he had made eventually. Similarly, a great entrepreneur has to be judged by how well the business is doing in terms of metrics.
Since general ambition is mostly undirected, a long period of general ambition will result in unfulfilled ambition. Reason being you’ve never truly committed a direction to put sustained efforts in. Hence, the best recipe to avoid unfulfilled ambition is to actually move from general to specific ambition.
Going from General to Specific ambition?
Or put simply, how do you become directed from undirected? This is a much harder endeavor than it looks but there are some heuristics.
Instead of going big, you start small.
Instead of going outward, you go inward.
Instead of going outcome-based, you go process-based.
Here’s one of the many ways you can approach this. Look at your current work and see how you can be better at that. Once you’ve become better but you still dont have specific ambition about it, that likely means that you’re not interested in this work enough. Hence, try something new.
This is a much longer topic and I think PG’s How to do what you love is a much better primer for this. However, the key insight here is to look at what ideas you’re getting and try and execute small parts of them.
Specific ambition is perhaps one of those things that you dont know how to find it, but you do know once you have it. Like product market fit. And love.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list to know if you have specific ambition about a field:
You are interested in the details about a topic that most people often overlook
You truly care about being better at it, so much so that it physically hurts you when things are low quality
There’s a certain level of pull / gravity towards that work. You often end up thinking about the work when idle.
You prioritise that work over long periods of unproductive pursuits. Often, other people would call it sacrifice but to you, it doesn’t feel like that.
There’s a certain level of inexplicable joy you feel when crossing milestones in that field, even if those milestones are not at all visible to other people
Dangers to ambition
Ambition is a fire that requires constant fuel and hence it’s important to understand the factors that stop that fuel.
Mimesis - Ambition does come at a sacrifice and there will always be people who weigh on that sacrifice more than the ambition itself. Direct / indirect opinions of other people on why you shouldn’t be ambitious, eventually get to you.
Similarly, opinions of people on what you should work on instead, just because it seems more high status, powerful or money-making, also get to you.
Cynicism - the path required for achieving your ambition is long and hard and it’s not uncommon to become bitter from all the pebbles hurting your feet. This leads to negativity and self-doubt.
Impatience - in outcomes. There’s a quote in Hindi that I’d read in my childhood
समय से पहले भाग्य से ज्यादा कुछ नहीं मिलता
No one gets anything before time and beyond luck.
Things take their own natural pace, and while that doesn’t mean you don’t push efforts, it does mean that when you get anything is beyond your control.
4. Lack of Interest - Combine all of the above dangers and ambition becomes a game of attrition. But the biggest threat to ambition is a loss of interest in the field, if you don’t like doing a thing enough, you will never be ambitious enough to put in the extra work.
Djokovic was once asked why he continues to operate at such a high level of mental and physical excellence game after game and he said:
Djokovic: “I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball.” FT interviewer: Are there players who don’t? Djokovic: “Oh yes. There are people out there who don’t have the right motivation. I can see it. But I don’t judge.”
Avoiding these dangers requires a lot of discipline and that discipline is a simple equation:
Discipline = f(Importance of doing something (to you) + psychological reward of pursuing something - psychological cost of doing it)
If you really like doing something, you are more likely to term it important and so will the psychological reward of doing it, often enough to cover up for the costs such as societal approval, impatience, self-doubt etc. If not, it’s always an uphill battle.
If you’re ambitious, the first thing you can do after reading this is understand where you’re on the ambition spectrum. If you’re on the general ambition side of things, try and move towards specific. If you’re already on the specific side of things, make sure you don’t let the dangers affect you. Truly ambitious people are rare, and if you’re one of them, I hope you stay that way :)
There are cases when great is not linked to outcome but just means great work. E.g. you envision yourself to be excellent or the most diligent. However, this framing is not very useful because you have not defined what work you want to be excellent at.