How to honor your ambition (without being an ass)

Many inspirational phrases use the word dream: Dare to dream, Follow your dream, I have a dream, dream big, dreams can come true.

Once you start talking about ambition, the phrases get a little… ick. Unrealistic ambition, political ambition, career ambition, curb your ambition, etc.

Ambition is usually seen as something ugly, something we associate with petty, greedy, competitive people. Backstabbing politicians, gold-diggers, office politics and nepotism. Women, especially, have been conditioned not to have it, with a common criticism of women in the workplace being that they are too ambitious. Mona Eltahawy lists Ambition among the seven necessary sins for women and girls. If we are to actually make our dreams come true and effect change in this world, we must embrace it. 

But how? Even acknowledging ambition can be scary, especially as we get older. We might feel a little silly saying, “I want to be a New York Times bestseller” if we haven’t yet finished writing our first book. We might believe that ambition is for the young, or for the corporate workplace. Having ambition, especially in the creative professions, seems gauche, even though every famous actor or singer got there because they were ambitious. 

What does it mean to truly honor your ambition? During the pandemic, when we were producing The Night Wolves, I got a little intimidated by the cost and reached out to my friend Eric (the founder of Scruff). I asked him how he thought about investing his time and money, and whether he ever thought about pulling out and going back to the safety of a steady job over the risk of a startup. His answer has informed the way I think about writing ever since: once you’ve set aside enough to pay your bills and put food on the table, why wouldn’t you give everything else you had to your idea if you really believed in it?

Fundamentally, what keeps us from being ambitious is a lack of self-belief. We do not think we can achieve our dreams, so we keep calling them that. A dream is something ethereal, inarticulable and elusive. It is always just a bit out of reach. Ambition is a bit more concrete. Once you state your ambition, you have to start being honest with yourself about achieving it. You cannot have an ambition to run a marathon in six months and then not train for it. It’s much more pleasant to call things dreams; they can stay there forever, without you having to lift a finger.

Strip ambition of its modern and monetary connotations, and what you’re left with is fear. Primal and consuming, raw ambition is simply the fear of death. It is the fear of dying without having left a mark on the world, of dying without having your voice heard, of dying unremembered or unloved. Who doesn’t fear this?

No good ever comes of suppressing such a primal fear. What does work is embracing it, understanding it and learning from it, letting it be the fuel that we channel productively. I’m not suggesting anything new. The most iconic explanation of this comes from The Dark Knight Rises, where Bruce Wayne climbs out of the pit without the rope, so fear can give him wings. 

Some people are reminded of this fear when they have a health scare, others when they get past a certain age, or when someone they know dies an untimely death. I’m not sure what reminded me (given the state of the world, it could have been anything), but I took the last 2.5 months off from work because I felt that fear and decided to listen to it. I’d already done the usual responses (got a will in place, organized my finances, etc.) but what remained underneath all the surface solutions was a deep-seated need to write it out. I wrote about 300,000 words over the last 3 months. Besides Her Golden Coast, which is now published, I have at least 3 more novels in various stages of draft. Hooray!

Ultimately, ambition is the fuel that drives you toward your dream. You have to work as hard as you can to develop the skills necessary, and you have to jump at the small opportunities that come your way. Those can lift you higher, but then you have to up your game significantly before getting bigger opportunities. This continues all the way to your ethereal, amorphous dream. I made an infographic with my INCREDIBLE DRAWING SKILLS (people who know me well know that I can’t draw a straight line even with a ruler). 

So what’s this about not being an ass? Well, those dotted-lines there, the opportunities? They don’t come by very often or to everyone. If you’re elbowing others out of the way to take them, you’re probably an ass. If you’re asking others to help you achieve your ambitions, you’d better be helping them achieve theirs. Deep down, we’re all just scared little children who want to be seen and praised for doing something hard. It’s that simple. 

Is there more we can do? Absolutely. One of the themes in Her Golden Coast is avoiding making relationships transactional. Many of us didn’t grow up with good models for that. Whether we grew up in the global north or the global south, we’ve all had experiences with feeling as if we’re not enough, that we can’t just have nice things without paying for them somehow. I’ve been working on practicing gratitude, on simply telling people when they do something that means something to me. As a shy introvert, this is much harder than it should be. I’m always afraid I’m imposing. 

Then, there are the few moments that tell me I’m on the right track. Yesterday, I sent a thank you note to my professor (the same Professor H– that’s mentioned in the book). I had to work up to it, to convince myself he’d appreciate it, even twenty years after the class. I told him:

“Not only is it written with a lot of what you taught me in mind, it actually mentions you (not explicitly) and your class as a plot point. Even the Flower Duet comes up, and the protagonists of the story, Laurie and Malini, are named to evoke Lakmé and Mallika.”

He wrote back: 

“I’m so proud of you, proud to have had such a student! I returned to teaching that Decadence course again last semester.  I’m glad it has reverberations for you after all these years, and I’m surprised how well it goes over now, even though I assured the students that almost everyone on the syllabus was more or less obscene, had an addiction, and died young.  We did indeed revisit Lakmé with the lesbian poetry again, such a pleasure to pause and just listen in class and watch two divas sing it in such jasmine harmony.”

Ambition feels really good this morning, y’all.