That’s the mindset that can make you do anything. It is wanting something really freaking bad, but that is not the definition of what I am going to write about. When I mean ambition, I mean the ambition to “succeed” in life. I mean wearing your heart on your sleeve 24/7 for your start-up that you dream to eventually turn into an enterprise you can look from your CEO seat, or having the consistency to choose to go to the gym and eat healthy for your dream body over and over again. The ambition to be the best in the sport you do or the music you create. It’s the most common attribute of the small number of dead people we still remember the legacies of share, people who differentiated themselves from the other 100 billion people that lived and died on this planet.
“Oh, working really hard for your goal is a very good attribute, but not too much okay? That just makes you look too aggressive sweetheart .” Well first of all shut up Karen. Secondly, I think that there is much more to ambition than that. You define your life with your ambition. It decides what you constantly have in your mind, it was the difference between me checking out the girls sitting on the bench when I was playing football and the guy who left his heart on the pitch. It was also the difference between me eating McDonald’s while my friends were making green sacrifices for their summer body. You may think this is going to lead to a point where I turn out to be a know-it-all douche who thinks making bad choices is cool, but it certainly isn’t. I admired those people refusing every time I offered them a cigarette, and actually got jealous every single time. When I was chilling in my cozy bed with some Netflix, there were a lot of moments where I doubted myself because I wasn’t studying or going to the gym. At this point, you should not expect to come up with a conclusive way to get it over with ambition, because I actually think there is something much deeper in this. I may be wrong, probably I am, but that thing about ambition still makes me smile thinking about it. Okay, so what’s “that”? I think “that” is a question, not an answer, and that question is “What we should expect from life?”
We kind of forget our existence most of the time. While we are in between school assignments and cooking, we never take the time to acknowledge “Wow, I am a smart animal that will live on for only 50 more years and eventually go back to where I was before being born and everyone will stop to care about me being ever alive”. It’s normal that we don’t say this every day, however, we all have an idea how we are feeling that day, and the reason for our emotion is basically the difference between what we expected from that day and what we actually got. So in the end, expectations simply shape our lives.
So, if expectations are the main thing going on, and if we get sad when we don’t reach them, why have them after all? Why not be satisfied with your grades, and do whatever you like instead of studying? Why don’t just eat a burger with chips, and don’t feel bad at all? That is where ambition kicks in. We have this image of our successful future selves, that we know we will eventually become, and we just feel better when we are working towards it and ambition is what drives that. However, the thing that confuses me is what happens if I don’t want to be “successful”? Maybe my successful future self is satisfied with a super humble life-why is that so bad? You see, for many people it isn’t. And I am not saying all average people are dumb-that’s actually the opposite of my point- but I think smarter people just put an intense amount of pressure on themselves just because they expect “success” in life. But the reality is that “success” isn’t even what they want, it’s what society programmed those over-achieving people to want, just to get better use of them. So in most cases, it’s not what we expect from life, it’s what life expects from us. So I can imagine what you think reader, but I am not really sure what my ideal happy future looks like.
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