Beyond Ambition (and thinking abt PhD)
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Hello friends,
This week, I want to share with you about ambition.
On a personal end, my current ambition to pursue a PhD Program, perhaps applying next year. The larger question is "What's a program (i.e a structured commitment with clear output) that
is in field(s) that sparks my mind,
gathers people who stir my heart,
allows me to pursue important questions
compels me to do joyful and meaningful work?
(The answer, apparently, doesn't have to be a PhD. This is a good example of zooming out from a specific outcome to what's really important behind)
I'm looking for 3-5 people who will be beneficiaries for this personal project. How might this process of finding & getting in a suitable program (not even completing it) be of help to you? I know that pursuing this ambition will generate some goodness and wisdom somehow, but I want to think specifically about some people who may find it helpful. Write back and let me know!
Speaking of ambition, here the personal invites the philosophical.
Have you ever been asked "What's your ambition?" and couldn't find a satisfying answer?
Did you use to have one and now feel strange for no longer having it?
How do you approach your own ambition if you have seen how much wreckage its blind pursuit has done on other people?
How do you reconcile the paradox of embracing your ambition fully and not letting it take over who you truly are?
This week's post is for those who wrestle with these questions. I’ve wrestled with it for a while and want to share with you what I found.
First, some personal text to help you see the motivation of my inquiry.
Growing up with a rather chill mother who teaches “do whatever that makes you happy and don’t be a bad person”, I didn’t feel much pressure to achieve or to become someone. I was a satisficer, aiming to do just good enough so that people can leave me alone to do my thing. While I admire people who are excellent in their chosen fields, excellence has never motivated me as much as the continuing pursuit of what is interesting and meaningful.
I want to succeed somehow, yet I have always been scared of being drown in the tricky current of ambition and achievement. I have seen enough of such single-minded focus cases around me and the kind of suffering they create for themselves, even in the name of some nobler causes like “better future” or “make a positive difference”. Like Ulysseus being afraid of the Siren’s songs, I’m weary of the sweet melody of ambition.
I don’t intend to inspire you to follow your path. Other motivational folks do it better. Rather, I hope to share with you what comes out of my own wrestling with those mattering questions that will not simply go away. I know couldn’t have done it alone, so I decided to borrow the wisdom of one of my favorite sage poet, David Whyte.
(On this note of borrowed wisdom, there is a particular danger in reading wise words from others and mistaking those with our own. Yet there is also danger in ignoring what the sages say. In the spirit of “choose what kills you”, I’d pick the former.)
I hope you enjoy the inquiry and find something there for you too.
Beyond Ambition
Ambition may bring us to the horizon but not over it. (PC)
The Essential Falsity of Ambition
I found some comfort in David’s eloquent writing on Ambition in his book Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words:
“Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it”
The first time reading the phrase “essential falsity”, I was struck by an unspeakable felt sense, almost as if I could only put a finger on this slippery insight rather than holding with my whole hand. Only on the 10th time rereading this passage that an Aha came.
First, while ambition at its core is false, we have to take it as if it were true in order to fully know that truth.
Fortunately or not, taking ambition as if it were true seems easy for many people. For some people, that comes easily. If you have ever been consumed by a big goal, you know that it becomes your life. There is no point in trying to talk someone out of his ambition.
As an example, I remember my ambition to go to college in the US. Had someone told me “Oh, where you go doesn’t matter as long as you are fully engaged in the learning”, I’d dismiss that as hypocritical.
Second, “essential” here has to do with necessity. Ambition has to be false. Such falsity is an inevitable built-in of the human experience, a feature and not a bug.
Which means that if you have never had an burning ambition, you maybe skipping steps too soon. “Essential” also implies that it takes a while to go under the surface to realize what’s true and false.
The hard lesson for the life-hacker type like me to learn is that this process cannot be rushed. I have to keep showing up and wait for grace to happen.
That’s what I’m learning myself.
Ambition: less tightly, more preciously held
The biggest ambition of my life so far has been about becoming a better person. Through it, I have experienced such “essential falsity”.
As I wrote about in Beyond Pride, I used to be all about improving myself. I approached personal development with so much passion and intensity as if it were the purpose of life. That phase lasted for a while, till several incidents made me confront with the fundamental beliefs of who I am such as “Do I even need to be good?” or “Do I even need to be growing?” The answer in both cases is the same: “No you don’t, although you can choose to.”
One thing that I didn’t expect in this maturing process is how hard it is to let go of my own ambition. Letting go doesn’t mean completely abandon, but to hold it less tightly yet more preciously.
Let’s explore what that means.
Despite its initial fiery outlook, ambition has a kind of anxious fragility that needs not more flaming fuel but attentive care.
What makes ambition different from fantasies or wishful dreams is that the latter is without fear of failure. In contrast, genuine ambition knows that failure neither dampens nor energizes it. Rather, failure only puts ambition in proper alignment with what David Whyte calls “the larger reality” of other visible and invisible forces surrounding. Richard Rohr calls this cycle of development of our consciousness throughout life time Order, Disorder, Reorder.
The ego isn’t gone. It’s just appropriately realigned. (PC)
Many people who go through an existential crisis or spiritual awakening suddenly lose all appetite for life, including their formal fiery ambition. That’s a bit like throwing the baby out of the water’s bath.
As I wrote before, the most challenging part after an existential crisis is that the inner landscape seemed so vastly different that I don’t know where to find my usual motivational hot stones to keep myself burning.
Truth be told, I miss the urgent and irresistible energy of ambition. Yet I knew there was no going back and had to sit with that tension between wanting the good old time and waiting for something to emerge instead of going for another metaphysical post-breakup rebound.
Now I know the new role for ambition. Its passionate fire used to ignite lukewarm situations, and it still does. The difference is that it stays no longer in the main driver’s seat but becomes the quiet, stable and powerful engine of the newfound self. The formerly obsessively focused, all-consuming, sometimes almost fanatic quality of ambition now merges with a greater awareness to make the bigger picture just a bit more intense and interesting.
We realize we are just one drop in the larger ocean AND we know damn well that the ocean needs that one drop.
(Apparently it’s rather hard for any normal human to embrace such paradox. As such, as a half-joking practical advice, I’m trying Mon Wed Fri as “fully driven by ambition” days and Tue Thu Sat as “totally open to grace” days. Sunday is kept fluid, to integrate the two perspectives. 😄)
Calling: dancing with the unknown
How do you not throw the ambition baby out of the water bath of existential crisis then? How could one harness its energy without being burned by it? How can one strive towards something and yet not trying to control the outcome?
The answer is through the practice of remembering the larger conversation. For some, it’s a regular contemplative practice from meditation, prayer or self-inquiry. For others, it’s regularly checking in with some wise people, dead or alive, to be reminded of the greater truth.
Once of such truth is that while ambition can bring us far rather quickly, we need something else to truly reach into the unknown. David Whyte calls it a calling:
Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it — that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek.
Ambition, even in its positive disguises, is about insisting a new, seemingly better, world. A calling has less of us imposing such an utopian vision. Rather, it’s more like a dance with that elusive possibility that already exists and is waiting to reveal itself. The only thing I know about such possibility is that it will not be what I think it will be.
For those of you who are also drawn to this kind of transformative work, it’s worth remembering that by definition, a transformation is “a change across forms”, which means we cannot use the old yardsticks to measure the new form of us. We can only have at best a glimpse, not a clear picture, of how different we will become.
Consider as an example from my own ambition of “becoming a better person”. In many ways I have achieved what I set out to do in relationships, work, writing. Yet the most meaningful changes are mostly out of my tight control. This precocious philosophical boy would never have expected his own firm steps into physicality, sexuality, dance and most recently business.
That reminds me of this provocative questions on unplanned personal development by Venkatesh Rao:
“How might you accidentally run into versions of yourself that you didn’t know were possible?”
“Will you choose the unexpected & more intense versions of yourself that you meet along the road of life? What new clothes will you wear if you do?”
Dr Strange says that more succinctly:
The Terrifying Signs of Vocational Calling
David Whyte continues to describe the nature of the two complementary forces of ambition and calling in a rather sober, realistic look against the usual romantic “follow your calling” ethos.
“Ambition left to itself, like a Rupert Murdoch, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves; breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.”
The first insight is that if our understanding of work hasn’t been humbled, simplified and enlightened over the years, we are missing that sense of vocation.
As a personal example, my current understanding of the nature of my work now is about discovering the part of me that knows how to live in this world. Throughout all the activities from learning, writing, organizing events, inner work, coaching etc… such discovery has been the theme. Once all the panicking voices of “Oh my gosh life is so tricky I don’t know how to handle it” subside, there is a quieter part of me that does know and appreciate life deeply.
Ironically or not, that knowing myself process happens through helping people get to know their own ways of working and being, alone and together. It is almost like making a mirror for others and then using it to see myself.
The second insight is that the bigger and fiercer our ambition, the harder yet more necessary for us to we stay close to our heartbreak. It is so much the common disappointment of failing to achieve our goals and then beating ourselves up. Rather, it’s the genuine heartbreak as we wholeheartedly encounter a different reality of another person, a community or even the whole planet.
If you have ever loved someone so much that it burns a irretrievable hole in your heart to see them shut down in your presence, you’d know what I mean. Yup, it can get dark pretty fast.
[...]
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Read the full post here, Beyond Ambition on Medium
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
How do you know when you should push harder or let go? To discover the answer, it’s useful to take yourself out of the center of the equation. We all think our work is about us and our talents and aspirations. It turns out that this is only partially true, because in order for your project or idea to work, it has to, at some point, spark. A relationship with the world — whether that world is the consumer marketplace, a business sector, or a single client — has to arise.
Good reminder from Susan Piver for the creative type in us who just like to create for the sake of creating itself.
"Remember Kant's Categorical Imperative as an ethical principle - don't treat people purely as a means to an end? Well, why do you sometimes treat yourself just as a means to achieve certain mission, no matter how noble it is? You don't have achieve anything or devote yourself to any mission to be. You can treat yourself well as an end." -
Charlie Gilkey in Start Finishing talked about how some creative professionals who are so dedicated to their creative work that they consider themselves purely as a "vessel to channel the universe" and thus burn out along the way. I see its resonance not just for creative professionals but also entrepreneurs, activists, anyone who has a lot passion and zeal for their pursuits. Such a good reminder.
Reading & Listening
(Read) Start Finishing: this week I've been devouring on Charlie Gilkey's newest book. I read quite a bit of - productivity book, but none has had such an emotional spark like this one. This man almost has a PhD in Philosophy but ended up doing logistic planning for the military, so he knows how to bridge getting thing done & purpose. You can find a sample chapter 3 there on helping you pick the most important project. The question "what's the project that you will sneak out an hour here and there to do?" is a brilliant filter.
(Listen) 13 Social Miracles in a Time in Between World with Zak Stein on Musing Mind: It's a blast of an interview about Zak's thoughts on education as a social function of human development (not as school). One of the question Zak posed that just wow-ed was "What is a dream so beautiful that it pains you to wake up from?" Perhaps we haven't dared to dream so well because we are afraid of the pain of not having it. What an invocation!
Lastly..
Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be helpful.