(2025-05-29) Ambition Is The Decision To Take Yourself Seriously

Ambition is the decision to take yourself seriously. I’ve always been ambitious. But I’ve also always been suspicious of that ambition, wondering if it’s a genuine hunger or just a prettier name for insecurity. Maybe I’m just desperate to avoid feeling ordinary.

Charles Black M.D. makes a thoughtful case for ordinariness. He traces our cultural obsession with greatness to the American promise that anyone can achieve anything, and the shame that follows if you don’t. When we equate success with exceptionality, everything else starts to feel like failure.

Ordinary isn’t failure, he argues. It’s freedom.

But maybe you can still be ambitious without needing to be great. In Psychology Today, business school professor Jeff DeGraff defends ambition as an internal drive to shape your life in a way that feels meaningful. He draws from Emerson and American pragmatism to argue that ambition, at its best, is a form of self-trust. Not the need to stand out, but the decision to take yourself seriously. It means continuing to move and learn, even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

What would ambition feel like if you didn’t need to prove anything?