Summary of the book " Return on Ambition" - Nicolai Chen Nielsen and Nicolai Tillisch
Key concepts in this book:
- Recognize the nature of your ambition so that you realise what you're attempting to accomplish.
- Prioritize your progress or well-being to get the most out of your ambition.
- Great ambition abilities can either be your best friends or your worst foes.
- Going too rapidly will cause you to lose track of where you're going.
- Unchecked ambition will eventually stifle your progress.
- Make a list of the reasons why you want to achieve your goals.
- Ambitious types looking to get an edge.
- Plateaued professional looking to break through to the next level.
- Anyone looking to optimize their workflow.
What am I getting out of it? In exchange for your ambition, you will receive more.
Big goals take a lot of time and effort, but they help us become our best selves. Even the most ambitious people, however, find it difficult to attain their goals while maintaining their self-care. And they frequently wonder if all of their efforts are ultimately worthwhile.
Because they don't comprehend the nature of their goal, ambitious people often struggle. For starters, while they seek to follow their own pathways, they frequently run into the constraints of social conventions. They also aspire to excel in all areas of their lives, both professionally and personally.
As a result, this summary is designed to help you understand the true nature of your ambition, educate you on how to quantify it and maximise your outcomes with the help of a few tools.
- You'll learn how to match your aspirations with what matters most to you.
- How to avoid the dark side of ambition, and how to develop a personal philosophy of ambition in this summary.
What do you mean when you say "aspiration"? Sure, it motivates you to work hard and achieve, but what precisely are you aiming for?
Keep in mind that ambition is similar to money in that it is not necessarily evil, but rather a means to an end. And, just as excessive spending may ruin your life, misdirected ambition, such as spending too much time at work, can have disastrous effects on your personal life and health.
That's why it's critical to lay down the foundation of your aim - that is, to spell out exactly what you want to accomplish and how you plan to do it. Because how can you expect to feel content if you don't know what you want and have no end goal?
The main takeaway is to understand the nature of your ambition so that you know what you're attempting to accomplish.
Getting clear about the nature of your ambition can help you determine the scope of your goals, the level of effort required to reach them, and the path you want to take in life.
Some people have a mind-boggling level of detail when it comes to their objectives. For example, from the moment she joined the Labour Party at the age of 17 until she became Prime Minister of New Zealand at the age of 28, Jacinda Ardern followed her aim with laser-like focus. Others go for their dreams with no specific objectives in mind. Trevor Noah, for example, has had a tumultuous career path. Before becoming a comedian and finally the presenter of The Daily Show, he was a computer repairman.
Consider how big your goal is and how important it is in your life. What is your desired distance from where you are now? Do you aspire to be like Jamie Oliver, a chef who prioritises family time in his life? Or do you want to emulate Rihanna, who has spent the last 14 years always outdoing herself?
Whether you wish to follow a pre-determined road or forge your own, remember that the higher your desire, the more difficult it will be to be fulfilled. This is because a high level of ambition necessitates a higher return. If you're trying to create the next Facebook, a million new users will appear insignificant in comparison to your goal. That is to say, it is advisable, to begin with, achievable goals.
2. Prioritize your progress or well-being to get the most out of your ambition.
It's critical to learn how to check the returns you're getting to get a feel of how achievable your goals are. To do so, you must maintain track of your health, development, and accomplishments. Consider this a holistic approach to ambition, one that considers all of the factors that contribute to your life's meaning.
Too often, ambitious people are preoccupied with their careers to the detriment of their personal development and well-being. Take, for example, Sadaffe Abid. Abid ascended fast through the ranks of the Kash Foundation, a microfinance organisation in Pakistan, after assisting in its founding. However, she struggled in the post and eventually took a break to pursue a degree in entrepreneurship at Harvard. This decision aided her development and gave her the confidence to take on a difficult task, and she now approaches her profession with fresh zeal.
The main takeaway is that if you want to get the most out of your ambition, put your progress or well-being first.
In fact, when it comes to ambition, well-being, progress, and achievement are all so crucial that they can be thought of as a three-legged stool. If one of the legs gives way, the entire building collapses. So it's critical that you strike a balance in all three areas because it's not just about striking a work-life balance; it's also about ensuring that all of your human needs are met.
Let's begin by considering your health. We've all experienced occasions when we worked so hard that we missed social events or put off workouts. Even if you remember this time as being particularly productive, ignoring other elements of your life will eventually lead to burnout.
Stagnation, on the other hand, is arguably just as terrible as burnout. Anyone who has struggled with the Sisyphean job of performing the same thing every day without progressing will recognise this emotion. To prevent becoming stagnant, cultivate a growth-oriented mindset. People who grow are those who take on new challenges, whether it's learning new talents or improving on old ones.
Finally, assess whether you have a clear list of goals and objectives. Set precise goals and devise a strategy for achieving them. And, as you set out to achieve these objectives, do it with realistic self-evaluation and healthy expectations. Ambitious people have a tendency to be hard on themselves and overlook their many accomplishments.
3. Great ambition abilities can either be your best friends or your worst foes.
Pernille Blume, a 21-year-old Danish swimmer, was considering retiring from the sport because she was losing faith in her talents. However, after discussing with her coach and obtaining greater control over her training, she chose to compete again. Blume qualified for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where she went on to win gold. Blume's honesty with herself and newfound devotion helped her achieve her goals in the end.
Snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis, unlike Pernille Blume, was a heavy favourite to win a gold medal in snowboard cross at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. And as the final unfurled, Jacobellis found herself in such a commanding position that she felt confident enough to try a "method grab." She didn't stick the landing, and her gold medal vanished in the blink of an eye.
Most of the time, your ambition will guide you in the proper way and motivate you to complete the task at hand. However, certain characteristics of your ambition may cause you to stumble and even result in failures.
The main takeaway is that the abilities required for tremendous ambition can either be your best friends or your worst foes.
As previously stated, ambition isn't necessarily bad; it's how you use it that matters.
In terms of thinking, ambitious people seem to have a lot in common. They are self-sufficient, adaptive, and competitive; they endure in the face of hardship, defy tradition, and take risks. Above all, they're motivated.
All of these beneficial characteristics, however, have a negative side. That same strong drive that pulls people forward can also cause them to move too quickly to notice faults or regard the feelings of their teammates. "Move quickly and break things," was Facebook's old motto. They altered it when they realised it wasn't working for them.
The main issue with all of these characteristics is that they tend to restrict your thinking. Boldness may rapidly devolve into arrogance, and too much independence can leave you feeling alone. While these results are bearable, they limit your ability to achieve your goals.
These characteristics, however, are a part of you, and they are both strengths and weaknesses. So, in the next blink, we'll take a closer look at what motivates these personality traits so you can learn how to avoid their negative consequences.
4. Going too rapidly will cause you to lose track of where you're going.
Maverick is a very aggressive, independent, and competitive fighter pilot competing for the top slot in flight school in the 1986 film Top Gun. While Maverick's competitive nature serves him well, his desire to be the greatest eventually leads to a plane disaster and the death of his copilot Goose.
Goose's death is an extreme – and Hollywood – depiction of the evil side of ambition, but it does make a point. When your ambitions are out of whack, you're more likely to make mistakes, alienate others, and lose your sense of self. In the same way that Maverick did following Goose's demise.
The main point here is that going too rapidly will cause you to lose track of where you're going.
Let's talk about bravery now. This is the personality trait that encourages ambitious people to jump in before they've obtained all of the necessary information or abilities. While they may succeed at first, their ambition will most likely outstrip their abilities at some point. When that time comes, it will be tempting to take dangerous shortcuts.
Ambitious people are also lone wolves, preferring to work alone because working with others slows them down. While their independence is a tremendous strength, they also lack the ability to ask for help and are severe perfectionists. Ambitious people are prone to burnout when they are forced to work alone because no one else can complete the task.
Finally, ambitious people are fierce competitors. This provides them not just the motivation to keep fighting, but also the knowledge of who and what they're up against. However, when they are driven by the need to be better than others, the evil half of their personality appears. This shifts the attention away from their own aims and turns everything into a conflict – with high stakes because their self-worth is at stake.
So keep in mind that the ultimate goal is to maximise your return on investment in your dream. Even the winner of the Tour de France, who must battle all those high mountains to stay in front, has a whole support staff behind him. So, to the extent possible, learn to temper your aggressiveness and value interdependence. When evaluating your accomplishments, compare yourself to who you were a year ago rather than to people around you.
5. Unchecked ambition will eventually stifle your progress.
When asked how long it would take to achieve enlightenment, the Zen master replied, "Ten years." "But what if I work twice as hard and meditate twice as much?" the student replied. "Twenty years," the teacher replied.
The point is that working twice as hard is motivated by impatience as much as it is my ambition. And in the real world, pushing yourself so hard has implications. Arianna Huffington fainted two years after establishing the Huffington Post due to tiredness and sleep deprivation from working 18-hour days. Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and a slew of other companies, told the New York Times that working 120-hour weeks was so stressful that he needed sleeping pills.
The main point here is that unchecked ambition will eventually slow you down.
Granted, accomplishing your objectives will necessitate a significant amount of effort, but ambitious people tend to thrive on pushing themselves. Perseverance, on the other hand, can become an issue when it takes its toll on the body. You'll experience declining returns when you're too exhausted to think clearly and can't thread a decent statement together. So don't confuse "doing things" with true development. Similarly, don't take on more than you can handle, because you don't have to say yes to everything just because you're ambitious.
Ambitious people believe that working more would result in greater achievement, yet burnout and stress do not contribute to good work. Furthermore, being overly ambitious might lead to you losing sight of what you're attempting to do or, worse, linking your self-worth to your accomplishments.
If you feel like the stakes are continually being raised, you're dealing with an irrational urge. This is an indication that your ambition is outpacing your ability to keep up. Another symptom is if you begin to be envious of others' overnight successes and question why you haven't yet "made it." Remember that everyone faces unique obstacles, many of which you may not be aware of. The mainline is that you can't judge your success based on the achievements of others.
All of these ambition-related characteristics have one thing in common: they all help you get closer to your goal, which appears to be a better position than where you are currently. So why not go there as soon as possible? The answer is straightforward: doing so will almost certainly make you unhappy.
6. Make a list of the reasons why you want to achieve your goals.
Vivienne Ming rejected down the position of top scientist at Amazon because it didn't align with her driving concept of improving the lives of others. Ming instead selected a job at Emozie, where he analyses cellphone data to determine a user's emotional condition. Ming accepted the role because Emozie agreed to let her utilise the information to treat bipolar people. Ming was able to find a job that allowed her to grow, succeed, and take care of her well-being because her ambition was guided by a set of ideals.
Double back and reflect on your philosophy of aspiration if you've ever lost the thread of why your goals are essential to you. Your philosophy, which is based on your defining values, will help you evaluate your achievements and lead you as you advance in your profession.
The main point to take away from this is to figure out why you want to achieve your goals in the first place.
What's the difference between having objectives and having an ambitious philosophy? To begin with, goals are simply the end results you're aiming for; your philosophy determines why you do the work. While objectives might guide you in the right direction — for example, pursuing additional education or training – true fulfilment goes beyond checking something off your to-do list. Your goals will be driven by what actually matters to you, which is the key to true fulfilment, and they will be guided by personal philosophy.
So set out an hour to think about your aspiration philosophy. Use this time to think about what matters most to you right now and in the future. What do you have reason to be thankful for? What makes you feel like you're alive?
Take as many notes as you need and think about what you've learned. Are there any recurring themes? Is there a guiding truth between the lines that you can see? And how does this reality inform your goals for the next few years, the next 10 years, or the rest of your life?
Create a handful of concepts using a single sentence for each one, keeping this list in mind. Perhaps you'd like to utilise art to raise people's understanding of the natural world. Or launch a tech company to address climate change. Alternatively, you may like to share your life with a caring companion. These are all excellent examples of guiding principles since they serve as reminders of what motivates you in the first place. And as you mature, reflect on them frequently to ensure that you're still in sync with your aspiration philosophy.
These blinks' main message is that ambition is neither good nor harmful. It can either help you achieve your goals or lead you down a path that leaves you empty-handed. So, instead of focusing on achievement, think about your ambition in terms of growth and well-being. Consider where your ambitions come from and whether or not they are actually yours. Always be on the lookout for the darker manifestations of your ambition. And you should develop a personal philosophy of ambition to guide you on your journey. You'll set yourself up for bigger returns on your ambition and a lot more rewarding life if you do these things.
Here's some additional advice that you can put into practice:
Make it a top priority.
While your long-term aim philosophy can guide you, in the short term, you'll need to determine an immediate priority — the one thing to which you must devote 100% of your time for the next three months. Choose something that is both aspirational and has the ability to impact your return on investment. In other words, something that both challenges and fascinates you while also providing a substantial return on investment. It's critical to remember that your current priority is one and only one thing. While this may appear to be a modest goal, it will help you focus your ambition and direct your energy to where it is most needed. This is the first of many goals that will begin to pay off your ambition – and as soon as you complete it, set another!
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