The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

More audacity, less ambition

On the last season of Love is blind (the only reality show I watch, mind your business) during the pod dates a woman asked a man: “What is the number one thing you are looking for in a partner?”
The guy immediately fires back with “ambition.” It was so fast that it made me wonder if it was truly his opinion or a sad evidence of capitalism infiltrating our thinking. Either way.
I snorted. And honestly, it stopped me in my tracks.

Really? Cool if you find ambition attractive, but the number one thing? Out of all the things about a person that is what is the most important to you?
For real?
Like, really?
The most important?

I don’t know how many times I said ‘really?!’ to myself out loud.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

I have no interest anymore in ambition. I even dislike the word.

On a podcast I recently listened to the question was posed: “Can ambition be virtuous?”

And I agree with the host guiding the conversation: it can’t. Ambition is inherently selfish.
Ambition requires you to have unhealthy priorities. I have seen it again and again. In myself and others. Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life - people, love, peace - to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism, so that at the very end of that achievement you can circle back to: people, love and peace. Exhausted and burned out.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

I have nothing to prove.

I grew up with conflicting themes as the first child, eldest daughter of immigrant parents, I was in between multiple worlds:
the parents that desperately tried to keep up the old world they left behind in the new environment they put us in - and a new world and culture I had to fit in if I wanted to survive.
My parents wanted me to be ambitious and do what they couldn’t do - at the same time I wasn’t allowed to do too much, achieve too much, fly too high.

I was always skating on the edge between soaring and flying close to the ground.

This theme has followed me all my life. I have been ambitious because I wanted to proof myself to my parents. I wanted to make them proud. I wanted to proof myself to my peers, to society, to the people I went to school with, to the people I went to church with, to the person working in the expensive boutique, to the strangers on the internet, to the business mentor.
I followed the capitalist rulebook for over a decade. It left me broken in pieces.

Ambition has never felt right to me, never felt good in my body. Always like a foreign, alien parasite. Something that doesn’t belong inside of me. For some time, due to the entrepreneur / spiritual guru messaging, I assumed maybe it was because I feel uncomfortable with being successful?

I know now, that that in itself is a weird notion: what kind of success are you talking about?

The commercial, capitalist lie that we are being sold that the number in our bank account / our credit score / our fame equals success or failure? The success that is monetary? The success where someone (I will probably never meet) has to pay and be exploited so that I can be comfortable?

Are you talking about the success where nobody is exploited so that a few can be wealthy and things are distributed equally between us?

Are you talking about the success where I heal the patterns that keep me stuck in an unhealthy cycle so that I can have better relationships with people and with myself?

Because if you are talking about the first kind of success, I most definitely should be uncomfortable with that, don’t you think? I want to be uncomfortable with that.

I know that trying to have a truly ethical business and make a big profit is nearly impossible in this world. I don’t know a single example of anyone “successfully” doing so. I know plenty of people (including myself) who try and are loved and cherished relationally by their audience, but just don’t make money.

No, ambition never felt right to me because applied to our system, it has become a never sated beast. Always hungry, always reaching.

There is no seasons with ambition, no pause, no rest, there is no cyclical living, no hibernation, no scaling down, only scaling up. But we, as humans are deeply cyclical beings.

Ambition doesn’t fit our nature.

No, ambition never felt right to me because now, I have nothing left to proof to anyone. Not because I am a raging success or all my dreams have come true - but because I know who I am. With or without achievements, that doesn’t change.
The titles, labels or accolades do not change who I am. They can be a bonus, but they won’t be my foundation.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.

Ambition is so celebrated and praised that it’s seen as a moral failure to not chase it.

I dare you to look at it differently.
Do I have dreams left? A few.
Do I have ideas I’d like to realise? Most certainly.

But I am not going there with ambition. I will go there with audacity instead. With courage. With my own pace. I will get there taking breaks and making detours if I have to. I will get there considering my impact on others. I will get there without sacrificing the most important thing on the altar of ambition. And if I don’t get there I know that I always acted in integrity with myself.

The more I heal, the more audacious I become. The more I dare to be who I really am. The more comfortable and free I feel to speak and live the truth I know in this moment. Audacity lets me move with faith at my own pace, not at the dictation of ambition. The more I heal, the deeper my courage to do what others won’t, to stand alone in my conviction. Audacity lets me create something that looks so different to the marketing messages and algorithms out there. Audacity lets me rest when I need it, it gives me space to be me in a system that doesn’t want me to be. It takes audacity to be you instead of being popular. I will take that any day over ambition.

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If you liked this piece you might enjoy Why I am team disappointing your parents.