The Clutches of Ambition

Family, teachers, and mentors try to instill it.

Motivational speakers pocket your money as they stomp around a stage preaching its glory.

Social circles materialize to compete against you in the search for it.

When it comes to ambition, I’m not sure which is more heavily pushed upon us — the pressure to find ambition or the guilt for ignoring it.

After all, without ambition, how would we create drive? Achieve big goals? Move from the bottom to the top?

Ambition is framed as the gold standard of precious energy that fuels our move up the ranks. Supposedly, it keeps you in the chase and guards against a free fall.

I’ve been there. Oh, yes.

I have tried to fuel myself with ambition. I’ve used the popular buzz phrases like, “Go Big” or “Toughen Up.” I, ludicrously, believed there was a badge of honor that came with exchanging work emails at 2 in the morning. Possibly the worst though? The manufactured persona of portraying myself as if I already had attained the “Next Level Up.”

When I reflect on nearly any meaningful jump I’ve made in my life, I realize it happened when ambition finally fell out of favor. It happened when ambition exhausted me and I reworked my path to be more simple.

Fear of missing something, anything…

If there was ever something I feared about the simple path, it was the thought of being less ambitious.

Will I become less useful?
Will I cut myself off from doing “big things?”
Will the simple path lead to laziness and irrelevance?

My life experiment proves otherwise.

In the *now,* I fill many parts of my day with simple routines and pleasures:

I tend to my health,
I eat most meals with my family,
I listen more and really hear,
I make time for thoughtful and in-person conversations,
I look in the eyes of the person who is talking with me, instead of just beyond them to someone who might have more to offer.

Gone is the ambition to be the best, the most, the highest, the first… the exhausting chase of a status yet to be achieved.

On the simple path, I discover the patience simply to do better — a practice performed slowly and daily that uses only what is available to me right now.

A simple path opens up new avenues to contribute and serve. To learn and then to share.

In the past seven days, I have been fortunate to:

• Sit down with an Olympic Champion and learn first-hand the attributes and values that matter most to her;
• Break a running barrier I’ve missed for over a year;
• Arrive in Mexico to help an international sports organization raise its game;

The more I keep ambition away, the more useful I become to others, the more available I am to serve simplicity.

With gratitude,

Joe

Hi, I’m Joe, the owner of 5 With Joe Performance Coaching. My clients are leaders, organizations, and teams who utilize my Olympic Gold Medal performance strategies and 40 years of navigating whitewater river rapids to streamline decision making and actions when engaged in complicated river currents of business and life.

The best way to interact with me is though Sunday Morning Joe, my weekly newsletter that explores the art of improving performance, overcoming challenge, and aligning with purpose for Sunday readers in search of more depth and motivation. Subscribe HERE for free.