I’m always surprised how people seem to bristle at the word ambition—as if it were synonymous with greed, selfishness, and exploitation.
But isn’t wanting to be a great dad a form of ambition? Or striving to be an excellent therapist? Or dedicating your weekends to a social cause you care deeply about?
The way I think about it, ambition is simply the desire to achieve something great. But if that’s true, why all the bristling and negativity?
Part of the answer must be a kind of conditioning process: because so many people we often associate with ambition also happen to be jerks, we start to unconsciously associate ambition with selfishness, greed, narcissism, and the like.
But I think there’s something deeper and more psychologically interesting going on here that has less to do with selfishness and more to do with fear.
We vilify ambition because, deep down, we’re afraid to take responsibility for our own ambitions.
I’ve been thinking about this idea for a while and there are at least three ways this fear of ambition shows up.
1. Ambition and Vulnerability
To admit that you are ambitious about something is to admit that you care deeply about it. And to care deeply about something is to make yourself vulnerable.
If you admit that your ambition is to write a novel, now you’re on the hook. You’ve put a stake in the ground. But what if the novel turns out to be terrible? What if nobody reads it?
It’s far safer emotionally to pretend you don't care because if you don’t put yourself out there you can never get hurt. If you tell yourself that ambition is just for greedy corporate types, you get to avoid the anxiety of trying and the potential shame of failing.
But like all forms of emotional avoidance, this short-term relief comes at a steep long-term cost: if you ignore your ambition in order to avoid vulnerability, you end up feeling stagnant, apathetic, and eventually, resentful.
2. Perfectionistic Ambition
Another reason we’re afraid of our ambition is that it tends to trigger perfectionism.
We look at ambitious goals—running a marathon, starting our own business, learning a new language—and our brain immediately jumps to the paralyzing expectation that we have to execute it flawlessly. But when ambition gets tangled up with perfectionism, it stops being a motivating force that pushes us forward and becomes a weight that holds us back. So our brain learns to associate ambition with stress, self-criticism, and overwhelm. Unsurprisingly, then, we avoid it.
But there’s no reason being ambitious has to mean being perfect. In fact, if you look closely, most ambitious people are extremely messy—they have long histories of failures, setbacks, false starts, and deep doubts—but they keep going because they’re okay with their ambition being messy.
You can allow yourself to want big things while simultaneously accepting that the pursuit of those things will almost certainly be messy, flawed, imperfect, and full of mistakes.
3. Mimetic Ambition
Often we learn to avoid and suppress our ambition because early in life our initial attempts at ambition fail—not because we’re failures, but because we were ambitious about the wrong things.
René Girard popularized the concept of mimetic desire—the idea that often we don't actually know what we want, so we just look around and copy what other people want. Desire is highly mimetic whether it’s the kind of car you drive, the neighborhood you want to live in, or your ambitions.
You think, for example, that your ambition is to make partner at your law firm, but really, that's just what all your peers want, so you unconsciously assumed you should want it too. Or you think your ambition is to write a book, but really that’s just the stereotype in your head of what a successful writer should do.
When you spend years working hard for something you don't actually want, it's exhausting, disappointing, and if we’re not careful, I think it can lead to a deep cynicism about ambition in general. But the problem isn't that you were ambitious. The problem is that your ambition wasn’t your own.
It’s hard to look out at all the unhealthy versions of ambition we see and not wonder: Is that really what you want or are you just chasing what you think you should want?
What’s your ambition?
In Jungian shadow work, often our deepest fear—the thing stuffed furthest away in the darkest part of our unconscious—is our own potential. Which suggests, I think, that one of the primary goals of therapy, coaching, introspection, or really any kind of self-work ought to be taking seriously the idea that we all have the capability—and perhaps the responsibility—to do something great with our lives. And while that can be a scary thought, we shouldn’t let fear hold us back from reclaiming our ambition.
Learn More
If you enjoyed this essay, here are a few more from me you might like:
Work with Me
If you’re interested in working with me, I have a private coaching practice for anxious high-achievers as well as an emotional health skills training membership, The Friendly Mind School.
