#8 Ambition

Ambition. Are you ambitious? It feels like a loaded question. If the last card asked if we are Capable, this card asks where we are going with it. I definitely have a “dirty word” connotation associated with “Ambition”. Vain ambition. I grew up in church. In that context, ambition was often treated as a dirty word—a code for greed, vanity, or arrogance. To be ambitious was to be suspicious. Ambition is kind of a coded way of talking about greed or arrogance. For me to show ambition would come at the cost of others’. But hard working & aspiring. Those are concepts I could traditionally get behind. I would like to be seen as very hard working. As being successful & capable. And aspiring. Aspiring to what, I guess? Aspiring to humility? Aspiring to greatness? Aspiring to fame or fortune? Maybe you’re highly ambitious. Maybe I’m highly ambitious. I play myself off as a simple country boy. But I have accomplished many things. I am more than I was. I am greater than how I started. I am kinder, I am wiser. I am more attuned to my values and more interested in others’. I care very much about the people around me. And those are learned, accomplished things. I suppose they have required a certain ambition to ideate something new, some new way, some new method, and follow a path toward it. Ambition can be like a fire, I think. Ambition can warm the home or burn it down. Ambition probably can be really evil and ugly when it’s unkempt and exercised at the expense of the people around you. But it can also be the home-fire burning, warming the hearth and the home built around it. It can be what gets us up out of bed in the morning, gets us out into the day when it’s raining. But we must mind our sense of ambition lest it consume us. What if we were ambitious about each other? About our values. About the things we value. I guess I’d like that to be my story. Ambition viewed through the lens of kindness, one of my own core values. In all we do, perhaps we can be ambitious and unapologetic advocates for the poor, the weak, the marginalized. What if we tempered our value for ambition with a value for others. Not at our expense but as our privilege. We can build a big hearth, we can build a big fire. We can warm the people around us with kindness and a newness and freshness of ambition that puts others first. Get full access to Nick Walton at nickfromoregon.substack.com/subscribe