What’s with ambition getting a bad rap?

There’s a recent trend of putting down ambition, and ambitious people. It’s all over Substack and Twitter and other echo chambers I’m a part of.

People are pulling down trends of yesteryears, like “hustle” and “grind.” Nobody wants to be seen working their asses off anymore and nobody appreciates you going on and on about it.

Please feel free to work as long as you want, just don’t talk about it. But hey, don’t forget to talk about how less you work and how much more (than us) you make. That’s certainly music to our new-age ears!

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some merit to this pushback. People who peddled “the grind” were never fully transparent about the trade-offs and the results. They didn’t talk enough about the factors beyond our control, like luck and privilege. They made us all believe that if we did what they did, we’d meet them where they were. Some of us were fishes never meant to climb a tree, but they didn’t care.

So yeah, they deserve it … most of it anyway.

But let’s take a step back and think about ambition and ambitious people.

This app on the phone you’re reading this post on … or the browser on the laptop (big screen users, give me a high five!), where did all this come from if not out of sheer ambition and the grit of ambitious people?

How exactly was this world made? Yes, it was built by millions toiling hard, doing the mundane and yet important work, but who sparked the main ideas, who lit the fire?

Who took that risk to go all in? Who sacrificed their personal lives, their family time, their hobbies, their health and their mental peace?

Before you jump onto, “hey, the world was better earlier” fallacy, please get into the time machine — which might be made sometime in future by ambitious humans — and go back and meet your grandparents or great grandparents and ask them how it was to live through the First World War, then a pandemic, then Great Depression and then Second World War. Ask the mothers who’d lose their babies to preventable diseases, ask the workers who’d just have enough for a meal a day.

The world is better because of ambition, because of people who wore ambition on their sleeves knowing well that it would bring a lot of pain for them personally.

I’m fine with the glorification of an easy life, a life without the burnouts and stresses. It’s good to aspire to such a life. And it’s baffling to me that we might be heading into times where it might be possible to be ambitious while having enough time for the other things life has to offer, so it actually would make more sense to be ambitious now, because slowly we are getting tools (hello AI) at our disposal that make it possible to improve exponentially in far less time.

So why this tug of war? Why the brutal takedown of ambition?

My hunch: Everyone aspires to be ambitious. When they look at someone who has used their full potential, they feel a tinge of despair. Their shattered dreams and compromises are dug up from the deep ditches they were buried into, staring back, right at their faces. They’ve chosen a life knowing fully well that just “being ambitious” doesn’t cut it. It requires them to make extraordinary compromises that they don’t have the stomach for. And yet the other person has made them and chosen to ride through the fire while burning themselves on the way.

Sounds harsh? I fear that’s the nature of truth.

I am one of these people, the kind that I described above. I envy ambitious people who’ve gone all in. I know I have big ideas and dreams but I am also aware what it takes to go all in. So yeah, I’m envious.

But what I will never do is put down someone just because they’re ambitious.

What I’ll never do is throw mud at ambition.

I’ll stand outside the arena and cheer for it, for them.

Maybe they’ll win, maybe they’ll lose.

But what matters is that they chose to fight.