Are You Ambitious or Just Afraid?

Recently, an old demon crept back into my life, one I’ve wrestled and banished many times, but somehow she always finds her way back to me. This demon disguises herself as ambition, and for most of my life, I thought that was what she was. My earliest encounters with her were in childhood, when I first became possessed by an insatiable desire for achievement. Greatness in all things was my unwavering goal, and while this demon has indeed enabled me to accomplish various things, she’s never actually led me to anywhere genuinely satisfying.

This insatiable desire is a quality commonly celebrated in our society and is often referred to as “drive.” We praise the forward-moving and their ruthless hunger for ascension. We admire the bulging muscle of their wills. What courage! What discipline! This is hero worship. But unfortunately for the hero, this drive never leads to any lasting form of contentment. For the driven person, the realization of an achievement often proves far less gratifying than they expected, and even if it does satisfy their desire, it does so only momentarily, before they find themselves hungry again. The hero can never rest, not because of the sheer power of their drive but because of its futility. Like a hamster on the wheel to nowhere, it’s a distraction from the fulfillment they actually seek.

The thing is, this insatiable drive isn’t actually ambition at all but desperation rooted in fear, and as I’ve learned over the years, our society has a tendency to conflate the two, to the detriment of all who fail to discern their important distinctions. Because the truth is that if you’re operating out of hunger, instead of fullness, you’ve already failed. Not only will you never achieve your true destiny, you’ve guaranteed yourself a long passage through the halls of misery with the false hope that it will eventually pay off. (If I could just publish that book, get that job, make this much money, have X number of followers, then I’ll be at peace.) As the journalist and novelist Rebecca West wrote, “All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretense that pain is the proper price of any good thing.”

So what exactly is the difference? How do we know if we’re acting out of fear or genuine ambition? To answer that question, you’ll need to turn inward and examine the state of your own heart. Is it overflowing? Or is it starved? Are your actions rooted in a sense of fullness and contentment or are they rooted in a sense of lack and hunger? Is your desire to offer something of yourself to the world? Or is your desire that the world might offer something to you, in the form of money, fame, or recognition? These distinctions matter because if you’re acting from within an emptiness, all of your achievements will be colored by this. They will ring hollow and cease to fulfill you. Like the hero, you will spend your life striving to fill a void that cannot be filled instead of acting from within your God-given fullness, which is the only soil in which the seed of your true destiny can grow.

Genuine ambition is about tending to this soil and the seed it nurtures, and then permitting it to grow in the direction that it seeks to, and at the rate it seeks to, which you do not necessarily control. It’s guided less by will and more by intuition, and thus requires discernment more than discipline. With our inner ear, we listen for guidance, and our wills help us to stay on track, not by driving us forward—for when you’re living out your actual destiny life itself propels you forward—but by keeping us focused on the guidance of our inner ear even as the world shouts contrary directions. (Have you considered law school? But there’s no money in that business! Publishers won’t find that appealing. If you quit, you’ll be throwing away your career).

True ambition always follows an inner track, never an outer one, and while these tracks may sometimes align, more often than not they run counter to one another. But how do you know which track you’re on? By which part of you feels most at ease, whether your soul or your ego. True ambition feeds the soul and starves the ego. It seeks harmony, not fleeting validation. It strives to be in flow, not in control. It’s perfectly compatible with the shifting demands of parenthood or other facets of life because it cannot be compromised by the circumstances of the external world. Instead, it’s one with them, and the events of your life are often just additional forms of guidance (Now isn’t the time. You have more to learn.). True ambition is a form of participation in life and never an attempt to vanquish it.

Effort, when employed in the direction of your destiny, feels effortless and even pleasurable. It’s not the muscular effort of will, but the liquid effort of flow. A river doesn’t push itself. It moves wherever it’s meant to, propelled forward by forces that transcend it. And it’s never attached to a particular destination, but trusts that it’s moving in the direction it was meant to go. In this way, possibility remains expansive and never narrow. An element of mystery is necessarily maintained. And like the river that always flows into something much larger than itself, true ambition is never self-seeking. It fills, rather than seeks to be filled. It’s a form of service, an act of love.

Fear-based ambition, however—that desperate drive to become something—is often in conflict with the flow of life, which always seems to be presenting us with obstacles to overcome. It’s ego-driven, and thus desires control, so all intuitive guidance is ignored or drowned out by the resounding voice of the will. The demon of desperation compels us to walk—not the path that has been cleared for us—but the one our egos have attached to, bolstered by the belief that such a path will garner us approval and praise. Approval and praise are the breadcrumbs we follow, but that’s all we will ever feast upon—breadcrumbs, in lieu of experiencing the fullness that is the knowledge of our inherent wholeness, a wholeness whose God-given purpose is to yield fruit.

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And that is really the nature of the driven person. They cannot act from within but are driven or controlled by forces outside of themselves. Their sense of self-worth and even the nature of their desires are shaped externally. They act, never from a place of agency, but a place of lack and need. And their actions are always compensatory, an attempt to heal the existential handicap that is their inner emptiness, and most tragically, when untended long enough, the seed of their true destiny will eventually wither into nothingness. Their persistent belief in their own emptiness, in other words, is ultimately actualized once they can no longer discern or fulfill the purpose for which they were born.

This belief in nothingness is the substrate from which the demon of desperation emerges. She needs you to believe you are hollow, and then to get distracted from your true purpose by striving to fill yourself up. She wants the seed of your destiny to wither because your destiny is a form of love, and there is nothing a demon fears more. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to banish her, even if you haven’t learned how to experience your inherent wholeness just yet. All you have to do is ask yourself a single question: What choice would I make if I wanted for nothing? Or, what would I do if I was already fulfilled? And then make that choice, knowing that if you walk the path that emerges from your faith in wholeness, you will never be alone. Like the river, you will forever be held by the banks that direct its flow.

Below the paywall: a handy chart to help you discern the differences between what I call “the demon of desperation” and” the angel of ambition,” which may be helpful to hang onto for those of you who also wrestle with these forces or struggle to distinguish between the two. Maybe, tape it above your desk?