Ambition

Last night, a colleague asked me at dinner: Do you still have the same level of ambition now as you did in your twenties?

It’s a good question. My immediate reaction—more in my body than in my head—was yes, which surprised me.

A lot of what this age seems to preach is a kind of slow down. “Quiet ambition,” a lot of essays call it. But I don’t think I want slower or quieter.

She asked the question to the whole table, and we went around. One colleague said she still felt ambitious and had big dreams. But now she was much more aware of what those dreams would require in terms of sacrifice, and she wasn’t sure she was willing to make those tradeoffs. Another explained that her ambition had always been relatively mellow. She lives more in the present than the future, cares deeply about doing good work, but simply isn’t very future-focused.

Then there was me.

Part of me wanted to give a practiced answer. The trending narrative for someone in my position. “Of course my ambition is quieter now. Of course I’ve learned. I’ve achieved a lot. I’ve burned out. I crave presence and balance and time with my family more than I crave the kind of ambition that drove me in my twenties.”

The problem is, that would have been a lie. That split-second reaction—the way my heart jumped and energy soared—betrayed my true feelings. Because if anything, I feel more ambitious now than I did when I was younger. Not in a frantic or chaotic way, and not achievement for achievement’s sake. But clearly, wildly ambitious.

One of my core values has always been scope. A big life.

As a child, I wanted to move to Hollywood and become an actress. My parents brought me to acting lessons and theater groups hoping they’d scratch the itch—but they only made me want it more. I remember the burning desire, the ultra-focus, the flow state that came when I was immersed in a role. Then self-consciousness kicked in around thirteen, and the window closed. By high school, the only acting I did was the daily performance of fitting in. But underneath the costume, the wanting never went away. The specifics blurred, but the scope didn’t.

What feels different now isn’t the size of the wanting. It’s the intention underneath it.

In my twenties, I gave my ambition almost all of myself. It was ego-led and short-sighted, exhausting and performative. When I started my business at twenty-five, it was pure chaotic ambition—running in ten directions at once, often acting before thinking. It worked, in its way. It also cost me more than I realized while I was in it. Health, friendships, and nearly a marriage. It had gains too, of course. I built a wonderful business, one that was mission-driven, had an incredible team, and made a true difference. It wasn’t all ego. But unchecked ambition always takes more than it gives.

Now my ambition feels refined. Not weaker, and definitely not quiet. Rather, intentional and focused. Yet urgent. Because my 40-year-old version of ambition knows more than ever about opportunity cost. It knows that every moment counts. That people die. That kids grow up in the blink of an eye. It’s hard to unsee those things once you’ve seen them, and they do change what “more” even means.

But as I read essay after essay about “quiet ambition,” about the comfort with oneself that supposedly comes with age and experience, the way striving falls away once we stop performing and achieving, I find myself wondering whether, in some cases, it’s just another performance.

Ambition does change, undeniably. For some people, it genuinely falls away. Maybe it was never central to who they were. But I suspect others are pushing it down rather than proudly claiming it—knowing it’s easier to say you never wanted something than to risk wanting it and not getting there. Easier to perform contentment than to admit you still hunger for more when the world tells you that you should have outgrown it by now.

I think more of us need to bravely claim ambition. Even when it feels self-conscious—because you already climbed, or you already tried and failed, or you’re supposed to be focused on family at this point in your life. The world doesn’t need less ambition. It needs ambition rooted in experience. Ambition without ego. Ambition pointed toward something larger than personal gain. I understand the philosophy of living in the moment, of focusing on what you can control. But I raise it scope—the need for impact, and the belief that it can create a better world. So if you feel it, don’t ignore it. Welcome it. Let it challenge you.

Hans Grundig, My Wife Lea, 1932. Lea Grundig was a painter and graphic artist who, like her husband, was persecuted by the Nazi regime for her Communist activism. She fled to Palestine in 1940; he was sent to Sachsenhausen. They reunited in Dresden in 1949.

The lens that’s helped me make sense of what I’m feeling comes less from trending essays and more from Buddhism. In that tradition, ambition isn’t flattened into a single moral category. There’s a distinction between grasping—the kind of craving that tightens the body and creates suffering—and something closer to aspiration, a will to act that arises without the same attachment to outcome.

In my twenties, my ambition was almost entirely grasping. It was tension in my body. Tight and restless and urgent, even when things were going well. Even when I had what I wanted, I was already reaching for what came next. Motion itself became the proof. The visible evidence that I was doing something right.

The ambition I feel now has a different quality. The drive is still there, but it’s calmer. Less performative. More confident. When I pay attention to it, it’s an energy source. It gives more than it takes. It calls me to action in a way that makes me feel excited, momentum, space.

I’m not interested in giving ambition up. I still want to build. I want a second round (and maybe a third and a fourth). I want to climb higher, but not to look down on others. I want to discover what’s up there—to gain the unique perspective that it’s impossible to have only midway through the climb.

What I want now is ambition that can live alongside the rest of my life without eroding it—ambition that doesn’t require turning health, relationships, and presence into collateral damage.

I don’t yet know where the edge of this version of ambition is. I don’t know how far it can stretch without slipping back into old patterns. I’m paying attention to that tension now instead of trying to resolve it too quickly.

When the question came around the table, I didn’t say most of this. I just said yes. And I sat with the discomfort of that answer, trusting that the work now isn’t to quiet the ambition, but to handle it with more care than I did the first time around.