Being curious with ambition
We talk about ambition a lot in professional spaces—having it, lacking it, dialing it up or down. But most of the time, we use the word without really asking what it is, what it costs, or where in our lives it’s actually living.
Ambition as the long game
In psychology, ambition is usually treated as a tendency to pursue important, often challenging goals over time—especially in achievement settings like school and work. In long-term studies, more ambitious people tend to end up with more education, higher-prestige jobs, and higher income.
But the story doesn’t end there. Those same studies usually find that the effect on overall life satisfaction is modest, and there can be trade-offs with stress and health in some contexts. Ambition seems to be very good at moving career markers, and much less straightforward when it comes to wellbeing.
The way I experience it is simpler:
Ambition is a strong, persistent desire that keeps showing up—a want that beats in the background of your life like a steady pulse, until it shifts, resolves, or fades.
That pulse can attach itself to work, yes—but also to caregiving, community, faith, craft, or relationships. The domain can change. The underlying rhythm is the same.
Ambition vs. motivation
A helpful distinction:
Ambition is the long game. It’s the horizon—what you want your effort, over years, to add up to.
Motivation is the short game. It’s the fuel—your moment-to-moment energy and willingness to act.
Your ambition can stay relatively stable (“I want to do work that matters;” “I want my kids to feel safe with me”) while your motivation naturally rises and falls with sleep, stress, context, and whether effort has felt rewarded.
That’s why you can have:
clear ambitions and very low motivation (burnout, misalignment, systems that don’t reward effort), or
high motivation with very little self-authored ambition (executing all day without a sense of what you actually want).
Nothing is “wrong” with you in either state. It’s simply how nervous systems respond to rewards, costs, and limits over time.
Where ambition got shrunk down to careers
Most ambition research measures things like job titles, income, and promotions. Those are easy to track, so they became the way we talk about “success.”
The side effect is that we start to believe ambition only counts at work.
But if we come back to the core idea—a strong, persistent desire that keeps returning—ambition clearly shows up elsewhere:
Raising children a certain way.
Building or tending a community.
Deepening a spiritual or philosophical path.
Developing a craft or practice over decades.
We didn’t prove that ambition only matters professionally. We mostly just looked for it there.
So the more useful question becomes less:
“Am I ambitious?”
and more:
In this season, where is my strongest, most persistent striving actually directed—work, family, community, faith, craft, or something else?
A few questions to sit with
If you want to be curious with your own ambition, you might start here:
When I say ambition, what am I actually pointing to—status, safety, creative expression, contribution, something else?
Right now, do I feel more like I have a long game with no fuel, fuel with no long game, both, or neither?
Outside of my job title, where do I notice that quiet, recurring pulse of “I really want this” in my life?
If this stirs something in you…
I unpack all of this in more depth—plus examples from history and philosophy, and the difference between healthy and destructive ambition—in a longer essay on my Substack:
Read the full essay: “Being Curious With Ambition” on Substack → [link]
If this stirs something in you…
I unpack all of this in more depth—plus examples from history and philosophy, and the difference between healthy and destructive ambition—in a longer essay on my Substack:
Read the full essay: “Being Curious With Ambition” on Substack
