My personal lexicon: ambition

[flexagon]

Sometimes I wonder out loud if I should be more ambitious, and the response is usually "silly flexagon, you ARE ambitious!".

Then I'm like "Oh yeah? Show me my goals then" and they're all "Look at all the stuff you do" and things devolve from there.

I think I've figured this out. I think I really only count it as ambition when there are long-term specific goals that assume/demand a lot of progress. For example, a plan to go to (and get through) med school is ambitious. Training to run a marathon, when one can currently only run 5 miles, is ambitious. Planning to get promoted in a year is ambitious, at a new job.

Stretching every day and working hard at stuff in one's current job description is just disciplined, not ambitious. (And I am disciplined, I won't fight you on that.) For the most part, I work on applying myself to things I can do, plus the next incremental step. Obviously that can take a person a long way, and the idea is to blink and look around every now and then to see where one is, and yet I would call no particular part of the process ambitious since it's all focused on the present and the immediate future.

Is my personal lexicon just way off from the way these words are used?

Comments

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

So are you saying you need to be more disciplined, faster?

[flexagon]

Nope. If I were more disciplined, faster, I'd probably explode. :)

I sometimes wonder if I should set more goals, maybe farther in the future, that include stuff I currently can't do. The alternative notion is that maybe my style is working fine for me.

(And an open question in my mind is whether more far-out goals would lead me to act very differently anyway, since the only thing one can do on any given day is the next thing on the road to that goal anyhow...)

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

I go back and forth on the long term goal setting thing. The leadership folks would say that if you don't set goals, you don't know if you've achieved anything. Then again, aren't there things that can't be quantified?

[flexagon]

Haha, great icon for this topic. :)

Yes there are things that can't be quantified, but I'd like to call bullshit on the thing about goals and quantifiable stuff too.

Just as a super-simple example, if I save $100/mo then after 10 months I'll have $1000. It doesn't matter a bit whether I had a goal of saving $1000, or I'm halfway to a goal of $2000, or if I was just saving on general principle with no goal in mind.

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think that there's great value in just seeing what happens as the result of a given course of action. A person could save $100/month as long as it is personally satisfying and stop when it ceases to feel worthwhile.

[flexagon]

Exactly. I completely agree!

It may come as a surprise, how much does or doesn't feel worthwhile. And it's worth finding those things out about oneself, in my opinion.

[miyyu.livejournal.com]

I think of some of it comes from the fact that being consistently disciplined can allow you to be ambitious - or rather, to be ambitious and actualy meet said goal. Sometimes being disciplined in and of itself is a goal too.

[flexagon]

"It" being the confusion?

Yeah, you're right, aggressive goals and discipline to achieve them go together very well. :)

My very newest thought on this topic is that goals are ambitious or not-ambitious, not people. No person is ambitious in every possible arena.

[flexagon]

Agreement from rifmeister on another channel:

yes. i think you're right on. i think your definitons are correct.
you are disciplined but not ambitious.
i am ambitious but (relatively) not disciplined.

Also:

those are different things.
you want to be excellent. you want to deliver high quality. but you don't want more the same i want more. you don't want to have a vast empire of minions doing your bidding. you don't want to have a huge amount of responsibility over everything. you don't want to be in charge of making all important decisions because anyone else is really more likely to screw them up when you come right down to it.

[bluechromis.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You know, I think I'm going to agree with you that perhaps you are not ambitious about your career, simply because "ambition" does imply a certain amount of goal orientation. You are, however, ambitious in many other arenas, knitting crazy awesome sweaters, working towards new variations of handstands, paying off your condo, etc. So, yeah, as you said, ambition I guess is related to a goal, not a person.

And by the same token I guess I have to admit going to med school counts as ambition. My objection to using the term on myself comes down to the fact that, relatively speaking, I'm not ambitious. If we compare future doctors to future doctors, I'm pretty mellow. I don't need to be chief resident, head of surgery, etc. Just wanna have some fun learning a bunch of really, REALLY cool shiat, and play with people's brains. MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!