is the ambitious man miserable?
I wrote this mostly as a reminder to myself.
Is the ambitious man miserable? If tunneled by the dazzling gold, do we not end up becoming cruel? That in our pursuit, we push aside others to fulfill our ambition, we create stratifications in our heads between those who are succeeding and those who are falling behind, we project. To those who are ahead, we project envy—dread, even. To those who are behind or idle, we project contempt.
Slowly, will we not become miserable and bitter?
And even, say, if we were to strike that fabled gold—is it not a futile attempt? That in the grand timescale, what one individual ever achieves is but an imperceivable punctuation in space time.
So, we tell ourselves this grand story to rationalize our misery—and the gods laugh.
Are we still ambitious if we're doing something for it's own sake—simply out of pure enjoyment? But in this case, competition dissipates. Ambition transforms from a ruthless drive to a passionate pursuit. We might even make an even larger impact through our passions simply because we are willing walk the long road—a token brownie for the ego.
I think Tim Ferris puts it best when he says that the bulk of our lives comprise of regular Tuesdays. If you can make the regular Tuesday a banging day, you'll have a banging life.