Ambition is a serious desire for distinction or achievement such as wealth, fame, honor, and power. On matters of ambition, you always wish you had more. You look at your peers, colleagues, family, or even random people who seem to have all that they want.
When you are an ambitious person, you always try to reach your set goals. Through dedication, hard work, and perseverance, you do not give up if you fail to achieve your set goal the first time you try. You always push forward as you are determined to succeed. Ambition and success may not be synonymous, but you should always strive to work harder and better to be successful as an ambitious person.
There are two types of ambitions:
1) Extrinsic ambition
This ambition is not part of your essential nature but rather motivated by the rewards you get if you achieve it, such as money, status, and fame. These desires will be the driving force of your work, and your success will depend on whether or not you do achieve them. With extrinsic ambition, you see what has happened previously in your field and look for available avenues to follow and succeed too. You will always have to fit into a given system that will create your success, yet it might reward the outliners.
2) Intrinsic ambition
Intrinsic ambition is when your willpower and desire drive you to create and achieve what you want. Your ability and motivation will determine your level of success. You will focus on the goals that mean a lot to you as a person and be a pioneer, risk-taker or stick your neck to the line because you want to attain your set objective(s). With this type of ambition, you become a slave to your principles, intuition, and desire to authenticate your point.
The following are examples of ambitions:
a) Material ambition
You always desire to have more money since you believe that money makes life easier and more enjoyable. When you are financially well off, payment of any bills and purchase of both products and services is much easier. With material wealth, you can go on vacation to various amazing places without much hustle or over-stretch on your finances. Many people believe that you are happier and more fulfilled with life when you do not have any financial challenges or worries because you have more freedom and less stress.
b) Career ambition
When you want to reach the top of your career ladder, determination, motivation, and an inner drive, push you to it. You can have this kind of ambition in any field: medicine, business, engineering, military, showbiz, research, and many more.
Best tips that can help you become ambitious
You can view ambition as a timeless, priceless, and valuable fire in your gut. You can create it within yourself using the following tips to achieve any goal you set for yourself:
- Be ready and willing to take risks
To become more ambitious, you need to be comfortable taking risks. At times, you will need a leap of faith and bet all you have on a single decision. To be more ambitious in life, you have to allow yourself to have the chance to explore different options at a time. If you try out, you could be having a great opportunity awaiting you, just around the corner. Psychiatrist Neel Burton says that having ambition makes you prepared for fear and anxiety. It also guides you on how to tolerate it. All you need is a consistent drive. Therefore, find out the fears ad risks holding you back, and achieve more. Once do this, create a more fierce drive within yourself and face them head-on to become more ambitious. - Expose yourself to contemporary thinking methods
One of the major terminators of ambition is social pressure. Accepting and taking popular opinion as your collect anxieties and fears of the masses and instills them in you. Therefore, the best way to handle it is to break away from this kind of thinking and be an independent thinker. Strive to be a unique individual to have a free and unbiased life perspective. It is likely to enable you to see several opportunities that other people may easily pass. It will leave you the only one pursuing them without any competition; hence you become more ambitious. - Uphold positive thoughts and get rid of negative ones
The things you allow in your mind affect you more than you may know, how you feel, and your work output. You always have a constant train of both positive and negative thoughts in your mind. Positive thoughts help you move ahead, while the negatives will create hurdles for you not to achieve what you want. Positive thoughts will motivate you to get out of your comfort zone and explore new things. - Be ready to invest time in your goal.
When wisely invested, time is the most valuable resource for the best results. The more you invest in any project, the better it becomes. To be more ambitious, identify a project and invest more time in it to finish it. To accomplish more in life, you need to sacrifice most of the luxurious things you do to use that time in your project. - Stay committed
Commitment is the stubborn zeal to undertake a certain beneficial activity even when you do not feel like doing so. Commitment is unpleasant when the conditions are harsh. It is essential to be ambitious, as it requires that you sacrifice most of your pleasures. To achieve more, create a strict schedule to enable you to stay committed and motivated to move forward. - Avoid babying yourself
For you to attain any progress, have ambition and action as bedfellows. There are moments when you cannot achieve your set goal no matter how hard you work, and you decide to give up and quit saying that you have pushed yourself too hard. In the guise of waiting for the perfect moment, you become lazy leading to stagnation. Do not be too relaxed; push to the unknown to achieve what you want.
Do not let anything limit you or fear and anxiety hold you back from being an ambitious person. Identify your goals, develop schedules, and stay committed to achieving them.