How to be more ambitious

There's certainly an argument that ambition is socially beneficial. Scientists who sacrifice their entire lives in the pursuit of a Nobel prize might benefit humanity more than one who was predisposed to taking Saturdays off. Inventors who toil, hoping to make it big, may create the next breakthrough when a more contented person might maintain the status-quo.

Whether ambition is a positive externality or negative one depends a lot on where it is directed. I believe in earlier times, when technological spillovers were low, being more ambitions usually just made you more cruel. Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan all had enormous ambitions—but they did so mostly by killing thousands of people.

I tend to think the incentives have aligned so that ambition is more often positive than not in today's society. Capitalism, for whatever it's flaws, tends to reward people for doing things that other people value. This isn't universally the case (Bernie Madoff certainly had ambition), but it seems more likely than in pre-modern times.

However, I'd like to put aside the supposed virtue (or vice) of ambition on a societal level, and just focus on the personal case. Forget whether ambition is good for the world or not, and just ask, is it good for you? If it is, is it possible to cultivate more ambitions?

I can see a few possible approaches to resolving this problem:

Widen your ambitions

Some people struggle with this because they have an overly narrow conception of what they ought to strive after in life. Maybe their parents told them they need to study hard, get a good job, have 2.5 kids and buy a big house to be a success in life. Maybe society doesn't care about the things they find most interesting.

In this sense, a lack of ambition is really that what you think of as ambition is overly constrained. Maybe you don't want to go to school right now, but you'd rather travel the world, make art or have a great social life.

Your ambitions should be tuned to creating the kind of life that you want. Not the life that other people want for you. Widening the scope of what things you could orient your life around may free you from some of the frustration you experience when you can't bring yourself to strive after the things other people push upon you.

Get onto a positive feedback loop

Another possible reason for lacking ambition might be, again, not the total lack of desire, but because all your intermediate paths seem to be surrounded by large walls of negative feedback. These reduce your motivation to pursue things, but also cut you off from the bigger picture life you still crave.

A good example of this might be school. You didn't do terribly well in school, and every class is a struggle. Yet, you know you need to graduate if you're going to pursue a career you'll find interesting. Thus you're stuck—between your long-term desire to have an interesting job and your short-term frustration with school.

The only way out of this seems to be to tunnel a new positive feedback loop. This isn't easy to do, but it can be done with sustained effort. A positive feedback loop is one in which the difficulty of the task is lowered enough that you can surmount it and build more confidence. From confidence comes competence and so you can slowly get to a point where the barrier of frustration is reduced.

Source: www.scottyoung.com