On Ambition

I’ve been thinking a lot about ambition recently. Kaitin has been working incredibly hard at nurturing her small business so that it can continue to grow and thrive. Some weeks she spends almost 40 hours on Knapping Press-related things — this on top of her normal 40-hour-a-week job. There’s no question that she’s ambitious and working hard to make her dream happen.

As for me? I have lots of ideas, but I’m nowhere near as ambitious. The whole point of me taking a sabbatical from this blog was so that I could focus on my book project. And while that work is ongoing, it’s not exactly progressing. I haven’t written much. Sure, I’ve done some outlining, and I have a huge google doc with links to tweets and articles that all tie into the various threads I want to weave together in my book. But in terms of words on a page? Not much.

My coworker (and fellow writer!) Anja has pointed out that planning, organizing, and researching are all part of the writing process, and I agree. It’s just hard when there isn’t much I can show for that work at this stage. It doesn’t feel like I’ve gotten very far.

This is where ambition comes into play. Some people are extremely driven. Kaitlin is an excellent example, as is my friend Shanif. He’s one of the smartest people I know. He has started multiple companies after developing software he coded himself. He’s legit a genius. These days he’s focused on AI (particularly ChatGPT) and how it can integrate to make other aspects of a business run more efficiently. (Shanif, apologies if I’ve totally butchered what you’re doing — that’s the gist of what I’ve picked up on from your tweets.)

Kaitlin and Shanif have ideas and aspirations, but more importantly they act on them. They put in the time and effort to make those dreams a reality. Or they’re trying, anyway. They’re doing their best.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I think I lack that drive. I haven’t spent a lot of time soul-searching why. My best guess is that my dad dying young (followed by the unexpected deaths of other people in my life) helped to shape my hyper-present mindset. Even before my dad died I wasn’t someone who had a lot of long-term goals and aspirations, but certainly afterward it became all the more apparent that we don’t have a ton of time to spend on this earth, so I might as well enjoy the here and now while I can.

In some people this kind of mentality could lead to debaucherous overindulgence. Thankfully I’ve always been a pretty moderate person in terms of indulgence, so I don’t spend my days drinking to excess or playing video games for hours and hours on end. However, I do like to play video games at the end of the day to unwind before going to bed. I like watching at least one movie a week — if not more. And I much, much, much prefer reading to writing.

Writing is hard, folks. There’s a reason why we turn to ChatGPT to write things for us. Writing is slow, tedious, and constantly makes me question my own ability. It’s so much easier to be a bad writer — or to share bad writing — than it is to make it good. And no matter how many hours I spend toiling away on a blog post, I know that in the end it will reach my small (but devoted!) audience and then disappear into the void of the internet as if it never existed. It’s hard not to think of that as wasted time.

I recently said to Kaitlin that I want to have written a book, but I don’t want to write a book. That’s it in a nutshell. As with so many hard and uncomfortable parts of life, I just want to hit the fast-forward button until I’m through the worst of it. I’m sure there’s some kind of Zen-like koan that says the journey of getting through that hard part is what makes the result more rewarding, but that doesn’t make the getting through it any easier.

Maybe the truth is that writing isn’t something I’m ambitious about. Because I don’t think it’s true that I lack ambition. Hell, I read the entire 800-page January 6th Report just for fun! And after our two-week vacation in Scotland, I spent a good chunk of last Saturday editing together a video called Scotland in 20 Seconds. It’s a compilation of sixty 20-second clips from our trip, totaling 20 minutes. That isn’t a project I needed to do, but it was one I wanted to do. More importantly, it was a small project that I could tackle in half a day.

So I don’t know. Maybe I don’t lack ambition. But even if I do, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It just means it will take me a lot, lot longer to get things done than it will for Kaitlin or Shanif.

I follow the writer Tressie McMillan Cottom on Twitter, and earlier this week she retweeted a woman named Jennifer Opal who tweeted: “Someone on TikTok said that the more they healed, the less ambitious they became. These words have never been more felt.”

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot. I agree that acceptance of my mortality might influence my level of ambition. By knowing (and worrying) about my death, I have nothing to prove. No delusions of grandeur, no need to foolishly try to immortalize myself through my work. It also means that the time I could spend writing I instead spend on smaller, day-to-day pleasures.

But on the other hand that feels like a bit of a cop-out. It feels like one of those pithy phrases I can tell myself to make me feel better about the choices I’ve made. In fact, I can even feel enlightened — “Look at me, I’ve accomplished so much healing!”

Anyway, all I know is that I’ve now typed a thousand words that aren’t for my book project. They’re not wasted words — or wasted time — because they’re keeping my writing skills active. This blog is the creative equivalent of stretching and staying limber. And who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll finally be ready to run that marathon — maybe.