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

[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.