Why I Gave Up on Ambition

The question to ask is, does ambition make us unhappy?

“So what are your long-term goals?” she asked me. “Where do you see yourself in two years, in five?”

I was interviewing for a position at a DC-based think tank. I answered, “I don’t really think about the future. I don’t care that much.”

“Well, I guess that’s…refreshing,” she said after a pause. I could tell from her expression that she did not actually find it refreshing at all, but flippant. Who was this lazy-ass person wasting her time, was what she was thinking.

Okay, the truth is I didn’t have the guts to say anything like that. I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure I said something along the lines of “I have exciting ideas about contributions I want to make and a progressive career path blah blah blah.” After all, I used to believe that’s how I was supposed to think. Plans, goals, up and at ‘em. I used to have an ego about these things: I was going to make something of my life. I pursued an important career because I thought that’s what smart and talented people who have the privilege of opportunity do. I worked hard, too hard. I burned out.

When you live in a culture that worships ambition and the attendant hard work it requires, it can feel so wrong to say “I’m not ambitious.” But I’ve been thinking that maybe, just maybe, ambition can be damaging. During the years I had ambition, I was unhappy. I never felt like I was achieving enough. There was always something more I needed before I could finally feel like I’d arrived. I always felt like I wasn’t getting enough appreciation or recognition for my contributions. I worked so hard all the time, exhausting myself, and the rewards that accrued to me weren’t satisfying or fulfilling.

What an awful way to live. Now, I do think many ambitious people find satisfaction going that route. They must, because they keep doing things that way. They like the chase, the big dreams, the thrill of expectation that there’s always more to be had. But I found that kind of life hollow and exhausting. Happiness and fulfillment were always out there on the horizon, never right here right now.

The problem with ambition, see, is that it can make us believe that more is needed to feel satisfied, and it draws our focus away from the small moments in the here-and-now that are the true measure of happiness. Gratitude and mindfulness practices are popular because they draw us back to these present moments. But what if you lived in those moments permanently? What if in each moment you felt like you had what you needed, you felt whole, settled, and at ease? What would a life comprised of many such moments look like? Would you cease to achieve anything? Would life lose its luster when you aren’t feeling excited about all the things the future will give you?

Does giving up on ambition mean you’ll become a lazy couch potato whose biggest achievement today is putting on some pants?

Not at all. In fact, you may end up achieving even more. You’ll be focused on expending your time and energy on the things that fulfill you in the moment, which will have the effect of creating momentum in your life, and that can lead to big things. You’ll probably find that these big things begin to almost happen on their own, with comparatively little effort on your part, because you’ll be excited about the stuff you’re doing right now and that will give you the right kind of energy to tackle the challenges that come your way.

Here are some of thing things I’ve accomplished since I started living my life for the small here-and-now moments: I finished a novel (after 15 years of failing to do so); started a weekly podcast; been consistent with writing a weekly blog post. During the ambitious phase of my life I got a PhD, but here’s what I was actually doing: waking up dreading the day; doing all the things I “should” be doing, often to the bare minimum of acceptable standards; climbing back into bed exhausted and mourning the loss of another day that wasn’t satisfying or happy. Oh, and drinking to anesthetize myself, let’s not forget that part.

As soon as I gave up on big ambitions and began to focus on enjoying the moment, that’s when stuff started happening for me. I felt momentum, excitement, fulfillment. And yes, happiness. I’m not without dreams for myself, but I practice detaching from outcome. The future can, and will, take care of itself. The power to effect change in our lives lies in acting in the current moment, and leaving the future open to possibility.

What Would Betty White Say?

It’s never too late to achieve your creative dreams.

I can’t emphasize this enough: it’s not too late for you. You’re turning 40 soon and still haven’t written that novel? Not too late. Turning 60 and still haven’t written it? Not too late. In your 70s and thinking to yourself, why bother now?

What would Betty White say? I think you know what she would say.

It’s not too late for you.

Here’s something I like to say: late bloomers bloom the brightest. Why? All kinds of reasons. You can probably think of a few yourself. I’m not going to list any here because my intention with this post is different. I’m here to tell you not only that being a late bloomer is awesome—better than being an early bloomer!—but also that we all have the capacity to be late bloomers, regardless of whether we already bloomed early.

That’s because what we all are is repeat bloomers. We are perennials, not annuals. We are meant to live out many iterations of blooming throughout the length of our stay here on earth. We excel at reinventing ourselves if we give ourselves permission to do that regardless of age.

You want to be a painter at 50? Go do that. Learn classical guitar? Do it. Make the rest of your life the brightest blooming part of it.

Never stop blooming.

How to Be a Late Bloomer

Or better yet, how about being a repeat bloomer?

This blog post is now a podcast episode!

Why would you want to be a late bloomer, you ask? Why not? Even if you were an early bloomer, nothing is more liberating and life-giving than feeling that life can have a second act, or a third. Or more! In fact, instead of calling it late blooming, let’s call it repeat blooming. Why wouldn’t you want to be a repeat bloomer? If you’re feeling stuck or bored in life, or if you’re prone to existential despair at seeing your years slip away and your accomplishments remain mediocre, take heart. We are all capable of being repeat bloomers, and I’m going to tell you why that is and how to do it.

Let’s look at this through a lens of what holds us back from being late bloomers. First, we’re told our brainpower declines as we age, so we think there’s no way we’ll accomplish anything at a later age comparable with what we could have accomplished in youth – so why even try? Despite what we’re led to believe, overall cognitive function does not decline with age. One type does, but another type actually improves. The type that declines – it peaks around age 20, so it starts declining before life has even really fully begun – is called fluid intelligence. This is the basic reasoning capacities of our brains, the functions that don’t rely on prior learning. Crystallized intelligence, which is the kind that builds over time as you learn and experience life, continues to increase slowly and then remains stable for much of adult life. But even when it, too, begins to decline, this isn’t necessarily associated with the loss of an ability to continue functioning at a high level.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells a story about operating on the brain of a 93-year-old man who fell off a roof while using a leaf blower. Dr. Gupta found him waiting for the operation fully conscious and reading about elections in East Africa on his iPhone. This was clearly a very high functioning old guy, and Dr. Gupta was curious as to what shape he’d find his brain in. What do you think he saw in there? Here’s what: a shriveled-up 93-year-old brain. As Dr. Gupta puts it, this aged brain “had almost no correlation to his function… We think of our organs as having this natural deterioration, and they do, but that doesn’t mean they can’t function like they did when you were much younger.” The incredible plasticity of the brain well into old age is something new research is revealing. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel a lot better about the prospect of aging.

But that’s just brain function. What holds most of us back from being late bloomers is psychological. Our culture tells us that we become irrelevant as we age, and that the time for achieving big successes or making great contributions has passed. The insidious part of this is that while it’s demonstrably false – there are plenty of examples of highly successful late bloomers – the fact that our culture believes it means that it has the power of truth in our lives. Dr. Nell Painter, a successful and lauded historian, found this out when she decided to get an MFA in art in her 60s. As she describes in her memoir, Old in Art School, her classmates, all many decades younger, weren’t even interested in evaluating her work during critique sessions, because her much advanced age created in them an “assumption of my inconsequence” (Dr. Painter is also Black, which added another dimension to this dismissal). Being a late bloomer means facing our own irrelevance in the eyes of the culture at large. As Dr. Painter’s experience shows, having the potential to be a “successful” artist is associated with being young. Indeed, potential is seen as equivalent with youth. And if you don’t have potential, i.e. youth, what’s the point?

Let’s take a closer look at potential. While youth is infused with hopes and dreams for the future, maturity is about having already arrived. As we mature and age, we are no longer looking at our potential as a future destination. We enter the era of living our potential. Knowing this is the key to being a late bloomer. When we start learning something new at an older age, we can leapfrog right over that stage where potential is something we are only ever grasping at and step right into the heart of it. The potential of youth is in the eyes of beholders, the gatekeepers who judge your progress and your possibility of future success. The potential of older age is something you possess and have sovereignty over. Put succinctly, you can do away with giving a shit what the gatekeepers and naysayers think. You’ve earned your right to define yourself and what your potential looks like.

In his book Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard lists the strengths of late bloomers, including insight, resilience, compassion, and wisdom, but one stands out to me more than others: late bloomers maintain a youthful and vigorous curiosity. Curiosity often appears as whims, and late bloomers tend to take those whims seriously, regardless of how “important” they seem or - and this is important - their future potential. Late bloomers know the secret, that pursuing your curiosity for the sake of appeasing it is what blooming is all about. The potential is in the pursuit. Something will come out of it, assuredly, because older people have more creative and wide-ranging cognitive resources at their disposal, but you can let that part develop naturally as you go along.

Being a late bloomer is a boon because there is less future ahead. It gives us reason to focus on what really matters about our activities: the process of actually doing them. Whereas a young “aspiring” artist may have big dreams about a career trajectory of prestige gallery showings and art-world esteem, an older artist can more easily understand and embrace the idea that it’s the practice that makes you an artist. And this goes for any activity you choose as your late-bloomer project. You no longer have the luxury of time to be “aspiring.” You must simply be. Being a late bloomer isn’t something you might be later if you accomplished something at some point. You must see yourself as a late bloomer now, as already having arrived there.