I’m convinced I can do anything I set my mind to. Why shouldn’t I be? I am smart, I am resourceful, I am determined. I’ve recoiled in the past when people told me I am ambitions, but I am beginning to understand what they mean. I took “ambitious” to mean something along the lines of “wanting to climb the corporate ladder”. That was always the context in which I’d seen it spoken of, after all. Characters in books or shows aiming to get ahead at work, to advance in some way at their job.
That doesn’t feel like me. I want to do well at my job, sure, and I want to learn more, but I do not have an inexhaustible drive to climb the ladder as quickly as possible, to make it to the proverbial top with the supposed fame and fortune to match. Advancement often comes with growth, but the two can also be mutually exclusive. To hear bosses at my jobs call me ambitions actually offended me. I don’t strive for climbing the corporate ladder, my aim is not to rise through the ranks at lightning speed.
But ambition does not have to just refer to career. Ambition is more about the drive to accomplish; it speaks more to the desire to achieve something and the willingness to put in the work to do so. It was a friend of mine who pointed out the flaw in my logic. Perhaps my oldest friend, who has known me for nearly two decades.
“You do dream, Majken,” she said. “You find something you want, you make a plan, and then you do it.”
I hadn’t viewed myself that way. I didn’t think of myself as having dreams. I have things I want to do, sure, but not dreams. They are just things that take work that I’d like to accomplish and am making plans to accomplish and am willing to put in work to accomplish. Simple. Not ambitions. Running half marathons, open-water swimming races, publishing books, they’re all just things to do, ways to fill this one precious life of mine.
I don’t have a good answer for why I viewed them that way. Dreams have room for let-down, I think, and my mind wanted to steer clear of the possibility that I might not achieve what I want.
I think dreams also have room to excuse never starting. If something is just a dream, it need never be anything else. Dreams get to be outlandish, unattainable. They are a safe place to put something you never have to push yourself to do.
Neither of those sit right with me, but I’ve let myself change the verbiage I use in my head. Now, I do dream. I have things I dream I achieve. They are things I want to do, things I can build a plan for, but they also get to have a moment in my head where they are shiny and a mite out of reach. They get a tang of suspension from reality, but they get a logical, actionable plan, too.
I do think I can accomplish anything I set my mind to. What I want to do, I will. That is ambition, that is dreaming. And those are lovely, lovely things