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

[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.