Why conventional ambition won’t get you unconventional success
Ambition: the desire and determination to achieve success.
— Oxford Dictionary
We’re told that those who are the most ambitious will become the most successful. But is this really true?
This statement leaves out a fundamental aspect of ambition which will determine any ambitious individual’s outcomes: how they define success.
I don’t mean defining success as conventional success vs. spiritual success or emotional success. Though I do believe mental, spiritual and emotional mastery are valid forms of measuring success and are an integral aspect of a successful life, what I’m discussing is society’s definition of success.
I’m referring to success based on some of the most conventional measures we’ve been told to aspire to — money, power, influence, status, prestige, reputation. I’m not saying these are good or bad definitions of success, but for those that are conventionally described as ‘ambitious’, I think it’s safe to assume that many of their ambitions align with prosperity in these categories. I want to explore whether the type of ambition we nurture and encourage in young people today is genuinely the most effective means to achieving this success we’re aspiring to.
Do the most conventionally ambitious individuals achieve the greatest amount of conventional success?
In my opinion, the way we express, foster and encourage ambition in young people is broken. Most people look at ambition from a linear perspective — they see ambition as getting to the next step on the pre-determined path they’re already on.
When you’re in high school — that’s getting into the best program. When you’re in that program — it’s being a high flyer academically and extremely involved in extracurriculars. Then it’s getting the best summer internship. Then it’s a return offer for a full-time job. Then it’s the biggest signing bonus, largest salary, the nicest apartment, or buying the most drinks for your friends. The problem with measuring success with these immediate, superficial and showy measures so early in one’s career is that it causes these ambitious individuals to miss something that some of the world’s most successful individuals understood: True success, accomplishment and achievement comes from exponential ambition, not conventional or ‘linear’ ambition.
We look up to people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs and other highly influential people who have contributed something unique to the world which has also made all of them very, very, very wealthy in the process.
If you look at their individual paths — you’ll notice something very distinct about all of them. They did not take any kind of certainty-filled, pre-determined, conventional “road to success.” They all took chances, bet on themselves, embraced uncertainty, had a large appetite for risk, and were willing to be perceived as crazy for a good portion of their early careers in order to later become some of the most successful individuals in the world — though there was never any guarantee that that would be the case.
You’ll notice today that many young, ambitious people make very different career choices than these individuals did. The ‘ambitious’ of today are not typically teaching themselves rocket science in their free time or dropping out of college to start a software company in their garage. They are going to class, dressing up in a suit and tie for recruiting sessions and signing off their first few years after graduation to a big corporation in exchange for a healthy sized bonus and promises of professional development and the ‘opening of doors’ for the future.
The hope, for many, is to spend a few years grinding at these prestigious jobs before they can move on to pursue “their big success”. That big success might include dreams of starting their own company, joining a start-up or having some great impact on the world. The problem, however, is that when you define success by things like money, prestige, status, or job title, and you’ve learned to get loads of validation in the short term for obtaining those things early on, it becomes extremely difficult to let that aspect of your identity go to take a chance on “making it big” a few years into your career.
As a result, today’s conventional ambition is yielding the opposite of focused, risk-taking, intrinsically motivated young people trying to create something.
Instead, it’s created an abundance of polished young professionals analyzing how they can ascend into conventional success via a clearly defined path that has been taken many times before. No one wants to take chances anymore. Everyone wants to be sure they’ll be successful, so they channel their ambition into certainty. Certainty that they’ll make good money, keep a good job and live a comfortable life.
The problem is that we’ve now gotten to a place where as a society, we encourage conformity and discourage risk-taking and creativity.
We encourage bright, smart, ambitious young people to get a “good job” right after school, hop on the corporate ladder and start climbing. The harder they work, the faster they’ll ascend, and the more recognition they’ll get for being ambitious and successful. When someone says “I got a job at X” (let X = some big, impressive, prestigious corporation), everyone around them oohs and ahhhs, praising them for how brilliant they must be. Don’t get me wrong, I do this too, and it is very impressive and very difficult to get these jobs, I just don’t think it’s what is going to (a) lead to massive, exponential success for these individuals or (b) push our society in the direction we need to go in.
Conversely, when someone is genuinely taking a chance on themselves — starting something, educating themselves on a field that interests them, joining a start-up, moving overseas, whatever it may be — we furrow our eyebrows and pester them with questions to make sure they understand what they are “sacrificing” by choosing to step off the pre-determined path everyone else is locked into. Essentially, we discourage them from thinking differently.
Thus, we have gotten to a place in society where even though many young people have the ability to do whatever they want and potentially become wildly successful by harnessing the resources, network, knowledge and capabilities available to them to create something or find a way to add unique value to the world, they just won’t.
They subconsciously will claw with relentless ambition at a predictable, linear path, along with all of their bright, ambitious friends who will sacrifice anything and everything for the few prestigious, highly sought after positions which equate to success by our conventional definition of it. The conventional ambition we’ve bred into young people glorifies climbing that corporate ladder, sitting in the shiny conference room, staring out the window of a big corner office and ‘running the world’. However, what isn’t divulged about this conventional road to success is that these aspirational images of being at the ‘top’ are not necessarily where that path may lead.
To truly achieve the atypical success which will send you to the top of any industry or corporation, you typically have to do something no one else has done. You need to prove that you do think differently, that you had the awareness, determination and courage to follow your own path and drive change, innovation and improvement somewhere along the way – yet this is the opposite of what we encourage early in one’s career.
In Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life he discusses what came out of his Harvard MBA classmates’ pursuits in careers based purely around these measures of success — many of them went into private equity, investment banking, consulting, and other prestigious financially-focused fields. He points out that there were some people that truly enjoyed those career paths and ended up doing well in them, but the vast majority of his fellow classmates went into those roles because of the aforementioned measures of success — including money, prestige, and status.
These individuals were burned out within a few years, yet did not find the courage within them to leave their jobs because of lifestyle creep and an inability to part with the image of a ‘successful’ life or career they had begun to build their identity around. Christensen then described how at his 25 year reunion since graduating from his Harvard MBA, very few of his classmates whom had taken that path showed up and some of them who did (and the many who didn’t) tended to be unhappy, overworked, and watching their lives unravel from the inside — criminal lawsuits, prison, multiple divorces, estrangement from friends, etc. He even had an entire chapter in the book called How to Stay Out of Jail because of the sheer volume of white collar crimes which landed many of these formerly young ambitious, highly impressionable people in prison as 40–50 year olds for embezzlement, tax evasion, insider trading or other related crimes.
He noticed how people who were initially labelled as ‘ambitious’ tended to be the most attached to — and subsequently possessed by — the conventional definition of success. They also had the toughest time parting with it, causing them to ultimately be the least satisfied in the end.
The people who had the self-confidence, risk tolerance and exponential ambition to take bets on themselves, leave their corporate jobs (or never start them in the first place) ended up faring out the most wealthy, successful and happiest.
The point here?
We need to encourage a different type of ambition — not one where we only covet the few people who get the most desired spots at the top firms or companies, but instead adopt an outlook where we encourage young people to pursue creativity, innovation and unique success, not necessarily contingent on their first job after graduation or the number of clubs they lead in university. Let’s start praising raw, authentic, and unconventional ambition by celebrating those who invoke change, create something new or carve out a unique path, crafted from the individual’s values and aspirations. That’s the type of ambition we need to push society forward.
Any kind of ambition requires grit, determination and hard work — but not every kind of ambition will yield the same outcomes.
So, before you set your sights on your next goal, ask yourself: Which type of ambition are you channelling?