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

[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!