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Ambitious but at peace

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Re: Ambitious but at peace

#51

Post by hisnameisjimmy »

You don't need to be 100% in love with yourself to 'love yourself' or be kind to yourself to some degree. I think sometimes people (me) hear stuff like this, and feel like it's all or nothing.

Think of yourself as a coach to your 'self'. Good parents are often 'high expectations, high support'. So you can be very ambitious, but also support yourself. If you just whip yourself all day every day to get the outcome you want, you will wither like an abused animal.

I actually think the ratio is much lower than we think to feel good about things, which actually makes the bar much more attainable. If you spend 5% of your time expressing love/support for yourself, and 95% of the rest of the time being critical and judgmental, you will feel dramatically better and more motivated than 99.9% critical and judgmental.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#53

Post by shegerking2020 »

The way I approach this is integrating wisdom to my ambition. First step is to understand what the source of my ambition is. If my ambition stems from my need to impress others or gain superficial status then I understand my ambitious is misplaced and delusional. Kinda takes deep self-awareness to access the cause. I refuse to to leave my life in delusion. But if my ambition stems from a genuine internal desire and intrinsic motivation then I know I am in the right direction. In essence you want to align you goals with the truth of your being.

What is wisdom anyways? It is one of those things that is illusive to define and communicate. Wisdom is a check against your own self-delusion. And what is the true reality of things? Each one of us has a very unique and individual human experience. And when one truly accepts the solitariness of his journey there is no comparison possible and he is in an existential world where things simply “are”.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#54

Post by OmarShehata »

righthand wrote: post #9
siamese_puff wrote: post #4

Give it another 5 years and come back to me

Yes just a few more years of ambition boiling away inside soon to be reduced by half as they realize the average person’s support network for ambition is non-existent. We all have ambition and a peacefulness to it, but the most successful people have connections to utilize that peace and ambition. When your family or friends barely support your ambitions your network will not have a jump start on everyone else.

> your network will not have a jump start on everyone else

I think this is not the most useful frame. You don't necessarily need to outcompete people for limited spots (I think a lot of people's definition of success or greatness is very narrow, and mostly informed by what others are vying for)

I think the bar for doing something great is shockingly low, most people aren't even trying. That's the impression I get every time I read a patio11 article (most recently the super long but worth it "story of vaccinate CA" [1]. This is not patio but same vibe, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Manometer Readings" [2]). My takeaway from these is that there are big problems in society that nobody is working on.

This is kind of a good thing for ambitious folks: everywhere you look there are problems everywhere, the bar for making something better than what is there is low. I think the network & support is critical but it isn't always given. I think great things happen when we start to move towards what we are capable of fixing, what is within our control, finding others who have that attitude and supporting each other.

I think for me now, the point isn't to outcompete everyone/make it to the top 1% or whatnot, it's to make it as far as is possible with what I have. Those two approaches are identical if you have the support to reach the 1%. But if not, why worry about what is outside of my control? I have plenty within my control in the menatime.

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca/ [2] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/lies-damned-lies-and-manom...

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#56

Post by righthand »

OmarShehata wrote: post #54
righthand wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes just a few more years of ambition boiling away inside soon to be reduced by half as they realize the average person’s support network for ambition is non-existent. We all have ambition and a peacefulness to it, but the most successful people have connections to utilize that peace and ambition. When your family or friends barely support your ambitions your network will not have a jump start on everyone else.

> your network will not have a jump start on everyone else I think this is not the most useful frame. You don't necessarily need to outcompete people for limited spots (I think a lot of people's definition of success or greatness is very narrow, and mostly informed by what others are vying for) I think the bar for doing something great is shockingly low, most people aren't even trying. That's the impression I get eve…

I agree. My point was less “outcompete and recognize network advantage” and more “without support you will burn up your ambition faster and move slower”. A lot of the time people look up to those who have made it and wondering how they can be equivalent; you can be just as successful as Richie Rich if you have people actually supporting your ambitions…which many successful people have but do not acknowledge.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#57

Post by dotnet00 »

sdwr wrote: post #22
AIorNot wrote: post #20

Like so many pontificating without life experience, this seems a little shallow, please repost once you’ve had a little more experience, kid.

I'm only 30, but this exact same realization has brought me a great deal of mental peace in the last few years. Separating the doing from the feeling (and especially the feeling-about-doing from the doing) makes weathering setbacks much easier.

Agreed. I'm just over halfway through my 20s, but this same realization has led me to finally just enjoying life a little.

All my life so far has been spent constantly stressing over avoiding (potentially unknown) setbacks. I used to ignore this advice because I interpreted it as giving up on my goals (and of course the stakes were much lower). But getting into real world stakes, I started to stress myself out so much that it was becoming detrimental to my health. Finally taking my parents' advice and adopting this mindset has shown me that I can be harshly self-critical and ambitious without making things miserable for myself. If anything, it has made me able to pursue additional ambitions.

Being dismissive because the author is only in their 20s is ridiculous, feeling at peace and being satisfied with the direction your ambitions are taking you in is not age gated.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#58

Post by wrs »

gottorf wrote: post #50
wrs wrote: post #38

I will humbly restate this advice slightly based on 2-3X the life experience: Don’t have “end goals”. There’s no way to be satisfied with that approach. Either you reach the end and haven’t achieved them (you’re a “failure”), or you achieve them but aren’t at the end (now what?). Instead, have a direction , or preferably more than one. Strive to make progress in those directions and celebrate your progress. If you en…

> Don’t have “end goals”. > Instead, have a direction, or preferably more than one. Strive to make progress in those directions and celebrate your progress. I like putting the same concept in these terms: most things in life are a process, not a state.

Yes indeed. It’s still good to celebrate when you reach a particularly good state during the process. Just don’t overconstrain the set of potential good states ahead of time, because the process might take you somewhere else.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#59

Post by wrs »

saalweachter wrote: post #43
wrs wrote: post #38

I will humbly restate this advice slightly based on 2-3X the life experience: Don’t have “end goals”. There’s no way to be satisfied with that approach. Either you reach the end and haven’t achieved them (you’re a “failure”), or you achieve them but aren’t at the end (now what?). Instead, have a direction , or preferably more than one. Strive to make progress in those directions and celebrate your progress. If you en…

"Journey before destination"?

More like ”journey is all there is”.

Re: Ambitious but at peace

#60

Post by dotnet00 »

b3kart wrote: post #16

> Ambition is about the magnitude of your end goals, not about your mental state on the way there. The problem is that once you tie your self-image to your end goals, no matter the magnitude, how can your mental state _not_ suffer if you're not achieving them? If I want to be a millionaire by 30, and I am still working a low-paying job at 29, I either concede that my goal is unattainable, or I suffer. Fundamentally,…

I disagree that the two are fundamentally at odds. If your goal is specifically to be a millionaire by 30, yeah, you're bound to be unhappy if you aren't near that by 29. But on the other hand, if you're more open minded about the flexibility of your goals, it can be a lot less painful. You just need the self-confidence that even if things don't go as expected, you're capable of finding another way or of changing the goal to something else that you find to give you similar or greater value.

I am a very harshly self-critical person in all my pursuits. Ordinarily it'd probably be pretty unhealthy, but I've always had a confidence in regards to technical pursuits (learning a new skill etc) that I could eventually figure them out, which has allowed me to reframe harsher criticism into stronger motivation. I didn't have this confidence regarding other things, which used to cause me a lot of stress and fears about being a 'failure'. Lately I've been building up this confidence for those things too, reframing being a 'failure' from someone who hasn't been able to achieve their core goals to someone who has given up on trying to achieve or change their core goals.

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