The dark irony of ambition

There is a particular brand of person that longs for more from life. They have a long wish list of activities and accomplishments to pursue.

You’ve met them before - they often say no to social events or leave early. They usually aren’t interested in leisure (it may even stress them out), and typically work long evening or morning hours with incredible discipline.

A conversation with them is inspiring and leaves you believing the world really will be a better place when they’re through with it. They exude optimism and enthusiasm.

They are ambitious.

Ambition is a necessary part of a successful culture. There always have to be people that believe they can make society a better place. We cheer for them, sometimes to a fault, because they remind us of a version of ourselves that we long to be.

We’re born with a deep longing to make a difference in the world. Sometimes it’s personal and quiet, and other times it’s cosmic. We all share a desire to be useful, loving, supportive, and even remembered. To build a life of significance. To not let our talent go to waste.

But to many seeking to realize their ambition, there is a very real dark side that nobody talks about - the suffocation and mourning of ideas.

Life is hard, and the world isn’t quick to respond to a request for triumph. It’s an uncaring collection of colliding forces, fates, and institutions all vying for a limited set of resources. Since success is hard to come by, the natural temptation is to spread our energy across more than one idea. Good ideas exist in abundance, after all.

But here’s where the spiral begins: the more projects we take on, the less time we can allocate to each, resulting in less progress and ultimately tempting us into adding more projects to our plate out of impatience. It’s easier to add than subtract, especially in a period of impatience.

The irony is that ambition allows us to work longer on more, but we spread our limited energy and time too thin to allow any project to have a fighting chance to succeed or finish.

One of my mentors kept a challenging piece of wisdom in his office:

Stop starting. Start finishing.

A few years ago I faced this demon directly.

For three years I placed my energy into a single project, and although I didn’t find any commercial success, the adventure was highly satisfying and good for my personal growth and goals. When I moved on, there was a void in my ambition budget that wasn’t being filled. With my newfound time, I spun up a series of different projects, each of which excited me in different ways but none of which got the direct attention I had given my startup.

I literally had all of these going on at once:

• Build software for tracking softball stats
• Build software to help organize softball LEAGUES organize (couldn’t help myself)
• Build software for managing documentation
• Writing a book
• Writing a screenplay
• Taking an online course to study data science and statistics
• Launch a business intelligence service
• Studying basic accounting
• Creating a board game
• Planning a second startup
• Running a candle making education service
• Relaunching my personal brand for the hundredth time

Unsurprisingly, none of them grew legs of their own or gained meaningful traction. Instead of shutting them down and reducing the surface area of my focus, I added more, thinking it was a matter of time before something big happened.

When I realized what was happening, it challenged me:

If I turned my attention to a single project, I’d have to give up everything else which I didn’t want to do. I knew this would make me sad because I was excited about the work and the possibilities of every project in flight. It would literally cause me grief to stop anything.

But the irony was clear - by having too many projects going on, I reduced the chance that any of them would ever succeed. The very energy bringing these projects to life was the same force suffocating their promise.

So I killed almost everything. And it did make me sad, but it brought me great relief.

The solution to idea suffocation is sequencing.

You have to make a hard decision to reduce your active work to only a small number of projects. It’s possible to collect the energy that introduced an overwhelming number of distractions and invest it into one idea.

Figure out which ideas to postpone until they can receive the necessary attention, and put things in the right order. Not every idea on your list is a winner. Most have a natural expiration date that’s hard to ignore because you believe in it too much.

The strategy is to place limits and literal calendar dates on ideas before they take more of your mindshare than they truly deserve, and to admit in humility when it’s not working out.

To that end, don’t be gun shy with how you invest in an idea - limiting your belief may also limit the chances of success. My advice is to give ideas the appropriate budget of time and money they deserve at each stage. Minor success begets modest increased investments. But if you fail to put any legitimate resources behind something, it’s doomed to fail anyway.

If you’re frustrated and feel like you’re spinning, take time to audit your active projects. Be honest about how it’s going, and brave enough to place some on the shelf until their number is called. After you mourn the idea, you’ll find a refreshing freedom with these boundaries that improves your chance of satisfying your unbridled enthusiasm to make a difference with your talents.