What Drives Ambition?
Ever stopped to ask yourself where a person's ambition actually comes from? Start with a distinction that often gets blurred: working hard and being ambitious are not the same thing. A hard worker squeezes the best out of whatever is in front of them, and many of them are perfectly happy with what they end up holding. The ambitious person keeps reaching for more. Truly ambitious people, in the worldly sense, are rarer than you'd think once you set plain hard work aside. What follows is a look at what actually fuels human ambition, and at how a steady commitment to personal growth can feed the ambition we already carry.
Is the engine faith, or is it fear of lack? We're told from early on that success starts with believing in yourself. So do the people who chase their dreams and seem to get everything they want really have faith in what they're building? Or is something else at work. Sometimes the driver is a fear of lacking, a quiet pressure that keeps pushing a person to acquire. And the strange part: the more you pile up, the more you notice what's still missing. What's missing might be free hours that have nothing to do with work, or a close relationship that got traded away for the sake of the climb.
Run on a fear of lack, or on the conviction that resources are always about to run dry, and the emptiness never fully clears. You'll also never run short of energy to keep going. We dress this up as a work ethic, sometimes convincingly enough that we fool ourselves. The Bible, along with several eastern traditions, makes the same point in different language: human beings are remarkably good at living inside their own illusions. The odd twist is that we hold the power, at any moment, to wake up and carve out room for growth.
In a culture moving this fast, making space for self-development is genuinely hard. It gets harder when a voice in the back of your head keeps insisting there will never be enough. That same fear may explain why so many people, in the United States especially, reach for medication rather than take hold of their own direction and build themselves up through personal work. Picture the Zombie Apocalypse as a metaphor for the morning a whole crowd snaps awake at once and sees clearly what has been done to them.
Here is what shifts as you grow: you discover you need far less than you assumed to live well. That realization sits underneath minimalism, and there's no shortage of minimalist blogs making the case these days. Learn to run your money and it stops running you. Money becomes the root of trouble only when we let it rule us through the fear of lack.
Living in abundance has nothing to do with being rich. It means being content with what you've got. The ambition can stay; you simply hold your current situation more lightly while you move toward what you want. One marker of growth is that you keep after your goals even as you accept that life is the trip itself, not some finish line you were promised your whole life.
Another piece of the abundance idea: the work isn't going anywhere, so you conserve energy by living with attention, handling what today actually requires and letting tomorrow sort out tomorrow. Our goals tend to arrive slowly anyway, built up over time. Time itself seems to stretch and slow when you stay in the present instead of flogging yourself to grab something out of fear.
Mindful living and living in the moment come to the same thing. A prosperity mindset develops, one where future and present fold together. You can almost watch your goals take shape before you've lived them, and that leaves you free to enjoy life the way it was built to be enjoyed. Work doesn't have to be the curse on mankind that some religions describe, even when the hours run long. It is, as people say, what you make of it.
Here's a result that surprises people: ease off the throttle in the present and you often finish more, because your pace turns steady and relaxed. Others might read you as lazy next to their own drive, but the gap between lazy and smart can be very thin. Stick with personal growth and you don't get lazier. You get sharper about working efficiently and clearer about what you actually want out of your life.
E Bishop Wooten, The Liberal Conservative Blog