I remain confused about your definitions. From the Paul Graham article:
If willfulness and discipline are what get you to your destination, ambition is how you choose it.
This would suggest a definition of “ambition” as it is commonly used: the tendency to choose big goals. On the other hand, you say:
Some people seem “born ambitious” but there’s not a lot I can change my actions based on that.
Okay, now I have a little insight into your motivations for thinking about this: you want to become more “ambitious” yourself. But this suggest “ambitious” to mean rather something like “capable of achieving big goals”—you don’t need to attain the “tendency to choose big goals”, because that’s trivially easy, and anyway, if you care about this topic, that means you already have big goals.
So, does your question in the OP mean something along the lines of “how do people become capable of achieving big goals”?
I think you’re equivocating between two possible meanings of “choose” here. There’s “choose” as in you start telling people “I want to write a book” and then there’s “choose” as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
Ah, yes, when I say “choose”, I mean system-2-choose (i.e. the former meaning in your comment). Learning how to
actually decide to actually write the book
(i.e. how to work with setting intentions, or in general, how to overcome akrasia) would already be a to-do included on the big to-do list called “achieving goal X”.
In any case, if I understand it correctly, the question still is: how do people become capable of achieving big goals, including whatever system-1 manipulation, intention-setting, habit-forming, incentive-landscape-shaping, motivation-hacking, etc. is necessary to achieve these goals?
I remain confused about your definitions. From the Paul Graham article:
This would suggest a definition of “ambition” as it is commonly used: the tendency to choose big goals. On the other hand, you say:
Okay, now I have a little insight into your motivations for thinking about this: you want to become more “ambitious” yourself. But this suggest “ambitious” to mean rather something like “capable of achieving big goals”—you don’t need to attain the “tendency to choose big goals”, because that’s trivially easy, and anyway, if you care about this topic, that means you already have big goals.
So, does your question in the OP mean something along the lines of “how do people become capable of achieving big goals”?
I think you’re equivocating between two possible meanings of “choose” here. There’s “choose” as in you start telling people “I want to write a book” and then there’s “choose” as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
Ah, yes, when I say “choose”, I mean system-2-choose (i.e. the former meaning in your comment). Learning how to
(i.e. how to work with setting intentions, or in general, how to overcome akrasia) would already be a to-do included on the big to-do list called “achieving goal X”.
In any case, if I understand it correctly, the question still is: how do people become capable of achieving big goals, including whatever system-1 manipulation, intention-setting, habit-forming, incentive-landscape-shaping, motivation-hacking, etc. is necessary to achieve these goals?