My personal lexicon: ambition
May. 31st, 2009 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonSometimes I wonder out loud if I should be more ambitious, and the response is usually "silly ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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?
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?
no subject
Date: 2009-05-31 06:12 pm (UTC)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.