Ambition - A Curious Thing

Ambition is a curious thing, and such a vague word. What does it even mean?

For everyone, it's different, and it comes from different places. Some fight for their own desires, some fight to help the ones they love, some do both. Some fight to prove themselves to others, to be loved, seen, and appreciated. Or they fight to change their lives and shitty circumstances, to escape that "quiet desperation" Thoreau spoke about. Some are doing it for others, hoping they can help those who can't help themselves. In one way, all of them are naive enough to believe they can, and maybe because of that, they decide to try their best. Most fail at some point, then decide to give up, surrendering to life and its cruel ways. They abandon their dreams and accept the nature of reality, knowing that at least they tried but didn't succeed. And maybe that's okay, for some.

But there is a certain type of person, naive and stubborn enough, driven enough, crazy enough, passionate enough, to go all the way. They climb the mountain a thousand times and fail every time to reach the top, knowing that one day, one time, they will reach the peak. I cannot understand why these people manage to push forward in the face of adversity, while others get crushed by it.

But maybe there is one thing they have in common.

That ambition to succeed keeps them up at night, in their house, in their offices, in their cars, or under a bridge, unable to fall asleep, stuck in this endless pursuit until it consumes their entire being. Only this matters: the pursuit of whatever they envision. The voice inside their head whispers:

"How will I achieve this? Can I even do this? Will I fail again? Why am I doing this?"

But every morning, that ambition wakes them up and pushes them to pursue what they've set out to achieve. Because they know that if they don't try their best, night will come again and they will have to face themselves once more, in the darkness of their own mind. And that is scarier than any mountain to climb.

For some of us, ambition is a desire to bring to life the dreams we wrote down on a piece of paper years ago, when we were still young and naive. A piece of paper on which we described how we would like our lives to look, how we would like to live and experience our lives. It's that piece of paper that got forgotten in a dusty drawer, but that lives inside our heads all day long, when commuting to work, or listening to the same old story of a work colleague at lunch. Maybe we've changed across the years, and our dreams changed too, but they exist as a reminder of which mountains we wanted to climb, and as a reminder to ask ourselves if we've even started the journey toward the mountain.

But even when climbing the mountain, is ambition enough to make it to the end? Or is ambition just a disguise for frustration, pain, and suffering, and everything else in that spectrum of emotions, disguised and focused onto one obsessive goal? Was Raskolnikov, the famous character of Dostoevsky, driven by ambition, or was it just madness and desperation? What is the difference, and does it matter if in the end, the result is the same? For this reason, I'm always confused by the word ambition, and how easily and often it is used by people to describe others around them. They call them "ambitious," without ever questioning what that even means.

It's worth noting how "ambition" changes and evolves across the years as well. From a very primal or naive desire, to a complex emotion that shapes our character and our actions further on. When fueled, it becomes stronger and stronger, with the risk of consuming oneself and destroying everything else in the process. The hike to the top of the mountain becomes an obsession, and the entire scenery, the squirrels climbing trees and the blossoming flowers, the clear spring sky, the old man enjoying his cigar in the fresh air and the joy of the journey, become obsolete. The only focus is the peak, not the journey. But what happens when one reaches the peak? What then?

But once started, the journey must be finished. Such is the "hero's journey" as described by Joseph Campbell, full of challenges and changes. If one succumbs, he will never find the end of his own story, and will always live in the stories of others.

So perhaps ambition is not just one thing, but many things at once, a compass, a burden, a fire, a curse. It's the voice that won't let you sleep and the force that wakes you each morning. It's the reason we start climbing mountains we may never summit, knowing that the alternative, never starting at all, is far worse. And maybe that's what makes it so curious: ambition doesn't promise happiness or even success. It only promises that we won't have to wonder, years from now, what might have been if we had dared to try. In the end, maybe ambition is simply the refusal to live a life unlived.