How do you get motivated? What causes you to have ambition?
I am one of the most ambitious men you’ll ever have the misfortune to meet (if you do). I am on record as saying that I understood Lucifer and Richard III.
There are many reasons for this, I suppose.
- Arrogance. It’s my natural assumption that whomever is above me in chain-of-command is not as smart, motivated, and able as I am and therefore should get out of my way.
- Insecurity. People over me in CoC have the ability to do things to me (fire me, transfer me, etc) and I resent that power immensely.
- Familial examples. Both my parents and one set of grandparents were (and are) incredibly successful in their careers. They were focused (family? what family?) and on the ball. They earned a ton of money and notoriety within their fields.
- Kids. Lest we forget there are two (and with luck more) small reasons why I need to acheive as much as I possibly can. College and such doesn’t come cheap.
- Competitiveness. I die each time someone performs better than me at anything on earth. And there’s few things I like better than beating someone at their game or mine.
I am NOT recommending this as a happy career path. But if you’re on it you’re stuck. Good luck to you.
Speaking only for myself, I make what I regard as plenty of money now in exchange for a not-too-taxing effort, and to me the idea that I should work my ass off and suck up to people above me with the goal of *maybe * one day becoming, say, deputy assistant supervising managing editor is utterly laughable. So no, I guess I’m not ambitious. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t take pride in doing my job well.)
Then again, I have zero self-esteem, I don’t particularly care that people above me in the management structure have power over me, I come from long lines of mediocrities, I don’t have a family of my own, and I’m not very competitive, to run through Jonathan Chance’s list, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that I’m not ambitious.
No idea whatsoever, but please let me know if you find out. I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering whether my own lack of ambition is some kind of character defect.
Oh my! I’m the Opposite of Jonathan Chance!
Ambition for what? Are you using the stereotypical ambitious definition to define someone who is career and money oriented or some other definition? A person can have ambition to have a good relationship with his/her community, a good family relationship.
I don’t think you can trick yourself into becoming ambitious, it has to come from a deep seated need and desire.
**Jonathan Chance ** - My dad has always been in the top 5% of wage earners, and when me and both of my brothers were growing up we rarely saw him as he normally works a 60-90 hour week. When we would come home from school and see his car parked in the driveway (which is normal for kids whose dads work regular 9-5 hours) we would get excited he was home. But that was rare, maybe 1-2x a month. Normally he wouldn’t get home until 10pm, then he’d be off to work at 9am the next morning.
Suffice it to say all three of us are very unwilling to throw ourselves into our careers. Even though my older brother wants to be a dentist, younger wanted to go to med school and now wants a doctorate in math and I want to be a chemist and maybe get a masters degree all of us have plans of retiring early or only working 15-25 hours a week. I was suprised to hear both my brothers were as ambitious about retiring early or onlyu working 20 hours a week as I am. And all of us are very ambitious when it comes to trying to live frugally. We are all pretty competent at saving money and investing and trying to stay out of debt.
This is just to let you know that if you live this way your kids may end up the exact opposite when they grow up. Sure my dad can pay for college but he could’ve done that and still had time for his family. Me and both of my brothers abhor the idea of working 70 hours a week at a job we hate just so we can but shiny things we don’t need.
Interest.
In my life, I dinked around for a good few before finally getting ambition.
I always though school was lame and boring, and didn’t take high school sereously. I graduated a year late, and wasn’t particularly bothered by it. The only reason I bothered to graduate was that I found something I wanted to study in college. I finished up 6 months of school work in a week, graduated, and applied for college the next day. After two years of computer graphics study (with a 3.3 GPA), I landed a job in the field and was on a career path.
A few months into that, I realized I wanted to study science. Chemistry, physics, something scientific. I filed that away in the back of my mind, right next to my ideas for a pajama-only cafe and building a puzzle themed home. I woked for a while in computer graphics and loved it. All the while the urge to learn was nagging.
I was lured away form that first company by a friend who offered me a position in another company editing videos. The potential for growth seemed good at the time. Two years later that had failed to materialize. I didn’t make enough to buy a house and start a life, and when my wife and I took a cruize for our 6th aniversary, I decided I wasn’t going back to work. I was tired of working crap hours for crap pay. Plus, I seem to remember Uncle Cecil mentioning something about working half as hard for twice the pay as a benefit of being college educated.
This last summer, I started school. I took 17 credits and averaged a 3.8. This was good enough to raise my average to where I was able to get a physics scholarship this semester. But I was really pissed that I got 3.8 and not 4.0 as I (still) think I should have.
So! I am now ambitious! But what is my motivation. I have analyzed it and here are a few things:
• Tired of working for too little
• Burning desire to accomplish what I want (in this case knowledge, primarily)
• Desire to prove to myself how far I can go
• Desire to be smarter than all the dumbasses I seem to have classes with
• Carreer goals (although not yet firm) which require good grades to accomplish.
• Giving up on my apathy
This last one is actually a big thing. I have gone my whole life and not known, or cared, what I wanted to do with myself. If you want to be motivated, giving up on slacker mentality is a must. Care about yourself.
Hope my rambling helps. 
I agree with Jonathan Chance word-for-word. I’ll add that I know that I can succeed, and see no reason to do anything other than that.
Well when I was young I had a burning ambition to work my way out of poverty. I was a pretty good student, without really trying very hard. I knew I had to get through college to get out of the factory-worker strata. So I stayed hungry and cold through a few more winters after high school, and I finally made it, I graduated from college. I was the only one in my family, including cousins, to graduate from college. I was the only one out of all of my high school buddies to graduate from college. So, I have black sheep written all over me.
Well, off to the real world I went. The first year or so I didn’t make a lot of money, but the pay scale was almost exponential for the following 5 years. Then I started working for myself, and the pay scale continued to escalate. So if success is measured by your paycheck, I guess I can say I was successful. Luckily, I also have my own Zen thing going where I don’t need a lot of shiny things.
So here’s the deal. Now my expertise is no longer in high demand (gee, I bet you can’t guess what I used to do). I can go back to school and bust my butt to come onboard with all the new development tools, but why bother? There’s not a big demand even for experts in the field, and the youngins would probably run circles around these days anyway. So what’s next? I hate to think of taking some menial job for minimum wage plus 10%. Should I go back to school and get my MBA? I’m not sure how that would work out either, my age is really starting to work against me.
I guess the bottom line is, I’m finding it very hard to get motivated to take a step backward in my career path.
Maybe it’s time to be ambitious about something ELSE.
There’s more to it than career and money. One can be ambitious in education, personal development, what-have-you.
I haven’t reached that stage yet but it could be right for you at this point.
Nothing honestly compels me to be ambitious. In my opinion, no amount of stress is worth any amount of money. My lack of ambition totally suits my temperament: I hate deadlines and being rushed and having to be someplace on time every single day.
I’ve never been ambitious. Neither of my folks were/are particularly ambitious either, and have never really offered any clear direction regarding the path I should take in life, and that’s cool with me. The only thing my parents always insisted on was that I go to college and stay out of jail, and I’ve managed to do both.
The work that I currently do is part-time media consulting, which keeps my lil’ mind stimulated while not forcing too much workplace stress on me, as I’m never stuck doing the same thing with the same bunch of chowderheads for very long.
HA!!! Creaky you rock!!!
I have finally thrown in the towel and I am now applying to the mega-companies of the world. I figure one of them will have some menial pigeon-hole job they can stuff me into for the short remainder of my life. My only requirement is that I don’t get sent to Iraq.
I’d say that I have these same motivations, but I’ve also managed to combine them with their exact opposites.
Hense I have bouts when I go mad and achieve loads and am proud of myself, and then phases when I do nothing and have no faith in myself.
It’s annoying, I’d much rather be one way or the other.
When it comes to a job, I’m pretty laid-back, too. I’m probably going to go back to school in the spring to be a teacher. I do excellently at my job, but my job is NOT my life and never will be.
I want to live. I truly believe you only go around once, and why waste it working 90 hours a week?
Yay, ccwaterback! You understand, you absolutely do. A job is a job is a job; the less time, energy and emotional investment spent on it the better. Even at my very worst and shallow, anything I do on my own time, the way I want, is more interesting and far more fun.
Your idea of just kicking back and disappearing into a big corporate machine is one of the better ways to go, assuming you want to banish a lot of stress from your life. The absence of responsibilty and politics and not having to work evenings and weekends kicks ass. Also, you can daydream a lot at work.