Ambition is slippery, often suspect. And still, I think about it all the time, as a structure: something that shapes the arc of my work, and the conditions of its possibility. What I want isn’t fame or visibility; it’s to mean it when I speak and act.
For me, ambition is a kind of scope. It’s not about ascent but coherence. I want to go deep, yes, but I don’t think depth is possible without breadth. Otherwise, you miss the long roots, the outer edges, the forces that frame what you’re doing. In short, you miss the world. Ambition, then, is the drive to situate things well—to push not just further, but outward, so that the work holds under pressure.
Still, it’s not just intellectual. Praise complicates things, and I’m not immune to the personal dimensions of it. I can feel something shift when praise becomes internal validation rather than an external confirmation that I’m on the right track. That’s when I know I’m drifting—not toward ambition, exactly, but away from the version of it that serves me best. Real ambition, I think, has far more to do with one’s own awe than other people’s approval. It’s the feeling that more is possible—and that you are capable of honoring that possibility, at least partially.
That said, I don’t moralize ambition. It’s not a vice to strive. What matters is what you’re striving toward, and I organize my life around that striving. Not because I want to become a certain kind of person—ambition as self-stylization doesn’t appeal to me—but because I care about what the work might do for the world. I want to make tools, ask questions that last, and help other people do the same.
I don’t talk about this much. Who do I think I am? I’d rather let the work speak for itself. But I don’t think ambition needs to be claimed aloud to be real. If it’s there, it shows—quietly, in what gets built, in what gets revised, in what refuses to settle for just being good enough. That inner flame doesn’t need announcing—only tending.
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