Ambition is not willpower, hunger, or hustle. It is awareness—a noticing of something inside us longing to be heard and expressed, and a devotion to shaping it into something the world might, one day, be better off for having.
I.
Every bakery, book, medicine, or movie started out in somebody’s head as a craving to do something with their life that mattered. Creativity begins with an ambition. That craving—whether to open a restaurant, write a novel, or raise confident children—is part of what it means to be human. It’s not corrupt to want to build. Nor is there any shame in having tried and gotten stuck. But to have nurtured an ambition, wrestled with it, and turned it over to the world—that is the stuff of satisfaction and a life well lived.
But the word ambition confuses us. In his 1828 dictionary, Noah Webster defined ambition as “laudable” but also an “inordinate desire for power.” Aristotle taught that every virtue is a “mean” between two extremes: one of excess and one of deficiency.
In excess, ambition becomes avarice, the lust for power at any cost, an ego-driven conquest. Too often, we fear the excess and discourage ambition altogether. Just because music can get too loud doesn’t mean we should silence it.
In deficiency, ambition is replaced by hesitation, envy, and shame. Whether it’s the first or the hundredth step, the challenge exhausts us. We decide not to take it. We too often watch others take the steps we haven’t, however, and use that as further reason not to take them ourselves. Somewhere, deep down, parts of ourselves argue. “We could do that,” is met with “If we could, wouldn’t we have?”
There, between excess and deficiency, stands virtuous ambition. It begins as a yearning to be useful, to make something we can take pride in. It requires curiosity and patience to learn what our ambition really is. It is awkward and clumsy, like an amateur screeching on a violin, for years, if not decades. And then one day, after its adolescence, if we’re lucky and keep at it, it becomes art.
To welcome ambition, instead of spurn it, is an act of courage. To have just enough belief in ourselves to wonder what we might create—and to try and do so—but also to summon the strength to resist the temptation of ambition’s excess, that is where the virtue lies.
But ambition doesn’t arrive fully formed. At first, it comes faint, more static than signal, asking us to lean in, listen, and tune in.
II.
Some things in life speak to us, even if they begin as a whisper, staying with us long after the moment has passed. Maybe it’s the laughter in a courtyard or the sorrow we felt closing a book. Each fragment seems trivial in isolation, easily dismissed as a casual affection, bundled into a basket with all the other things we like.
If we pay attention to what draws us, patterns emerge. Each interest feels like a part of a greater whole, a radio signal drifting in and out.
Admiration, I’ve found, is a terrific guide. The books I’ve stuffed with post-its and highlights, the lectures I’ve replayed until my wife teases me—over and over again, I return to a collection of writers, humorists, designers, urbanists, psychologists, and science-fiction authors. All, deep down, are committed craftspeople, philosophers, and communicators.
An ambition doesn’t arrive overnight, and that should comfort us as we explore and play with what we love. Many times, with time and perspective, we see the things we chased with youthful conviction were not ends but means—not the whole melody, but ingredients. Bill Watterson, the creator of the comic Calvin and Hobbes, said, “The truth is, most of us discover where we’re heading when we arrive.” I have that tattooed on my right arm.
Finding your ambition is more remembrance than discovery. It happens slowly, then all at once. You feel as if every fiber of your being might be torn apart if you don’t find a way to do this thing. To reject your ambition here is a prison sentence, and you are the warden. To embrace it is a reunion with yourself. Quiet. Seismic. Both overdue and right on time.
An ambition is a lover who only you can reject but who cannot reject you.
And I’ve spent my share of time in a cell. Since middle school, I was a writer unwilling to call myself one, spooked by the stereotype of starving for it. Instead, I put writing in service of other projects, misleadingly calling those my real pursuits. For decades I kept turning the dial, toward, away, back again, knowing in my bones that writing was part of who I am.
But this tuning in is insufficient. Ambition demands we learn to play in tune—to share the thing we’ve fallen so deeply in love with, so others can hear it too.
III.
The work of developing an ambition is in making it legible: first to ourselves, then to others. Tuning in is private: catching a melody no one else can hear. Playing in tune is public: expressing that song so others can hear and hum it. The good news is if we’re hearing the music we’ve done half the work. The bad news is that we’ve done half the work.
At the beginning, we finally work up the courage to tell our family the plan to make it big in Hollywood. We show them our first homemade film only to be met with blank stares. Silence—not cheers.
It’s hard to overstate how painful and awkward this part of the creative process is. We can hear the music, but we can’t reproduce it. And we know it. We know it’s not good enough yet. We make things—books, furniture, whatever—and for a long time they are proofs of our inadequacy.
Most people quit here, and who can blame them? Carrying with them a mix of jealousy and respect for anyone who kept going, the chasm between their excitement and others’ is just too far.
Ambition is little more than a creative hypothesis. The many acts of outward expression, each an experiment, strengthen our inward clarity. We hear. We play. We adjust. Each time we realize we must not have quite heard what we thought we did. Hearing and performance sharpen together, refined by patience.
But patience, too, though, needs discernment. Each experiment asks us to choose: press ahead, or change course?
IV.
There are two ways we meet the choice: with a closed fist or an open palm. The fist squeezes tighter, mistaking force for progress. The palm stays open. It listens, invites, adjusts.
In the mindset of the closed fist, we push harder and convince ourselves that full calendars equal forward motion. In the mindset of the open palm, we journal, reflect, and accept intuition as data. The fist resists; the palm welcomes. With the fist, speed blinds. With the palm, we pause long enough to see whether our latest effort sharpens or distorts the melody.
I can’t recommend the closed fist. A decade ago, I started a company with someone my gut told me wasn’t the right partner. I remember the moment I sat in a coffee shop and told him I didn’t think we should work together. He made his counterargument, and in a moment of insecurity I ignored myself. I closed my fist. And so we spent four years circling the same unresolved arguments.
Scientists run imperfect experiments, misled by their own expectations. The open palm notices the data; the closed fist argues with it. Difficulty, while unavoidable, is not a surefire sign we’re on the right path. Some things are hard because that’s the nature of craft. Others are hard because they’re wrong for us.
And the thing about that melody is that as we tune into it, we realize we are its composer. The call is coming from inside the house, and it is not finished being written.
V.
I began this essay frustrated. Favoring the open palm, I thought writing would help me tune into a clearer picture of my place in new urbanism. Instead, what I found was writing itself, the through-line I’ve kept in service of other ambitions, now asking to stand on its own.
My inner critic tells me I’m quitting again, that I can’t commit. But my regrets have never come from quitting too soon. They’ve come from forcing too long.
Ambition isn’t just a string of experiments. It’s a devotion to making something meaningful. To press the wrong ambition is to choke off a part of ourselves, to abandon the search is to rob the world of something beautiful. Better a slow, meandering search than a premature declaration of victory.
Ambition is not a destination. It’s a way of being, a practice of attunement, of greeting what draws us with an open palm, not a closed fist. Intuition is imperfect, but it is the most reliable guide we’re apt to find, if only we’d let it. And maybe that’s all ambition ever asks—that we listen.
Footnotes