I have seen many people try to become more ambitious. I have also seen many people in fact become more ambitious. But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone try to become more ambitious and succeed, leaving aside the sort of thing you call “hoops” and “fake ambition”.
There’s this thing, this spark, you could call it “independent ambition” or being “agenty” or “strategic”, and other subcultures have other words. But whatever you call it, you can’t get it by aiming at it directly. When I’ve seen someone get it, she gets it by aiming at something else, and if there happens to be a path to her deeper goal just by jumping through the right hoops—well, that’s much better, actually, it’s more reliable and usually saves her a tremendous amount of trouble. But if the only way to get her deeper goal is to break away from the usual paths and go do some bizarre novel thing, then sometimes she’ll do that instead. But of course there can be no hoop for breaking free of hoops, there must be some impetus from outside the system of hoops.
In discussion elsewhere people have mentioned being inspired by people with “protagonist fields” or just generally vibing a lot of ambition. Or by getting told that their specific goal was important and they should go bigger with it.
On a really micro scale, a friend of mine said I really improved his life by both modeling and encouraging a lack of complacency with the local environment. When my apartment was too dark I got brighter bulbs, when air quality and temperature caused competing needs I got an air quality monitor and ran some experiments to see where the pareto frontier was. When he was having serious SAD I walked him through the lumenator, and what changes in location were possible.
So I do think there are ways to increase ambition on the margin, they just don’t look like “shout very loudly about it”.
I have seen many people try to become more ambitious. I have also seen many people in fact become more ambitious. But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone try to become more ambitious and succeed, leaving aside the sort of thing you call “hoops” and “fake ambition”.
There’s this thing, this spark, you could call it “independent ambition” or being “agenty” or “strategic”, and other subcultures have other words. But whatever you call it, you can’t get it by aiming at it directly. When I’ve seen someone get it, she gets it by aiming at something else, and if there happens to be a path to her deeper goal just by jumping through the right hoops—well, that’s much better, actually, it’s more reliable and usually saves her a tremendous amount of trouble. But if the only way to get her deeper goal is to break away from the usual paths and go do some bizarre novel thing, then sometimes she’ll do that instead. But of course there can be no hoop for breaking free of hoops, there must be some impetus from outside the system of hoops.
In discussion elsewhere people have mentioned being inspired by people with “protagonist fields” or just generally vibing a lot of ambition. Or by getting told that their specific goal was important and they should go bigger with it.
On a really micro scale, a friend of mine said I really improved his life by both modeling and encouraging a lack of complacency with the local environment. When my apartment was too dark I got brighter bulbs, when air quality and temperature caused competing needs I got an air quality monitor and ran some experiments to see where the pareto frontier was. When he was having serious SAD I walked him through the lumenator, and what changes in location were possible.
So I do think there are ways to increase ambition on the margin, they just don’t look like “shout very loudly about it”.