Is Ambition Good or Bad?

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Ambition might be defined as a striving for some kind of achievement or distinction, and involves, first, the desire for such, and, second, the willingness to work towards it even in the face of adversity or failure.

To be ambitious is to achieve first and foremost not for the sake of achievement itself (which is to be high-reaching) but for the sake of distinguishing oneself from others. Were we the last person on earth, it would make little or no sense to be ambitious.

Ambition is often confused with aspiration. But unlike mere aspiration, which has a particular goal for object, ambition is a trait or disposition, and, as such, is persistent and pervasive. Having achieved one goal, the truly ambitious person soon formulates another at which to keep on striving.

Ambition is often spoken of in the same breath as hope, as in ‘hopes and ambitions’. If hope is the desire for something to happen combined with an anticipation of it happening, ambition is the desire for achievement combined with the willingness to work towards it. The opposite of hope is fear, hopelessness, or despair; the opposite of ambition is ‘lack of ambition’, which is not in itself a negative state.

Perhaps it is even the preferable state. In the East, ambition is seen as a vice or evil that, by tying us down to worldly pursuits, holds us back from the spiritual life and its fruits of virtue, wisdom, and tranquillity. In contrast, in the West, ambition is lauded as a precondition of success, even though the Western canon broadly falls against it.

For instance, in the Republic, Plato says that, because they are devoid of ambition, good people shun politics, leaving us to be ruled by bad people and their petty ambitions. Even if invited, good people would refuse to rule, preferring instead to hide in their libraries and gardens. To force them out, Plato goes so far as to advocate a penalty for refusing to rule.

Aristotle had a more nuanced take on ambition. In his Ethics, he defines virtue as a disposition to aim at the intermediate between the excess and the deficiency, which, unlike the excess or the deficiency, is a form of success and therefore worthy of praise. For example, those who run headlong into every danger are rash, while those who flee from every danger are cowards, but courage is indicated by the mean or intermediate.

To this day, we speak of ambition after Aristotle, as ‘healthy ambition’, ‘unhealthy ambition’, and ‘lack of ambition’. Healthy ambition can be understood as the measured striving for achievement or distinction, and unhealthy ambition as the disordered striving for such. While healthy ambition is constructive and enabling, unhealthy ambition is destructive and inhibiting, and, thus, more akin to greed.

The highly ambitious are sensitive to failure, and experience almost constant dissatisfaction or frustration. As with Sisyphus, their task is never accomplished, and, as with Tantalus, their prize is always out of reach. Just like Tantalus had a rock dangling over his head, so the ambitious have the noose of failure hanging about their neck.

The fear of failure checks the ambition of all but the most courageous, or rash, of people. For just as mania can lead into depression, so ambition can lead into anguish and despair. To live with ambition is to live in fear and anxiety, unless, that is, the weight of our ambition can be alleviated by gratitude, which is the feeling of appreciation for all that we already have. Although gratitude is especially lacking in future-focused people, ambition is much less toxic if even without it life can still seem worth living.

We are not ambitious unless we are willing to make sacrifices—even though the end of our ambition may not be worth our sacrifices, and not just because it may never be attained or approached. It could even be argued that with pure, naked ambition, the end is never worth the sacrifice. Fortunately, ambition is rarely pure but usually admixed with unselfish aims and motives, even if these may be more incidental than deliberate and determining; and it may be that our greatest achievements, that man’s greatest achievements, are all, or almost all, accidents of ambition.

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In that much, ambition is like the carrot that goads the donkey that pulls the cart. Studies have found that, on average, the ambitious attain higher levels of education and income, build more prestigious careers, and, despite the nocuous effects of their ambition, report higher levels of overall life satisfaction. Owing to bad luck and poor judgement, most ambitious people sooner or later fall short of their ambitions, but that still lands them far ahead of their more unassuming peers.

Why are some people more ambitious than others? To cut a long story short, ambition is a complex construct borne out of a host of factors including but not limited to: parental role models and expectations, birth order and sibling rivalries, fear of failure and rejection, feelings of inferiority or superiority, intelligence, past achievements, competitiveness, envy, anger, revenge, and the instinctual drives for life and sex.

From a purely psychoanalytical perspective, ambition can be thought of as an ego defence, which serves, like all ego defences, to enforce and uphold a certain idea of the self. Rather than ambition, which is a sophisticated defence, those who lack what it takes to put themselves out there are more likely to respond with less mature defences, for instance, by rationalizing that ‘life is unfair’ or that they are ‘less of a leader and more of a team-player’. If their ego is much bigger than their courage, they may become dismissive or even destructive, the latter also being a means of drawing attention or sabotaging themselves to provide a ready excuse for their lack of success: “It’s not that I failed, it’s that…”

A defence that merits exploration in the context of ambition is sublimation, which is among the most mature and successful of all defences. If a man is angry at his boss, he may go home and kick the dog, or he may instead take the dog out for a shared run. The first instance (kicking the dog) is an example of displacement, the redirection of uncomfortable feelings towards someone or something less important, which is an immature defence. The second instance (taking the dog out for a shared run) is an example of sublimation, the channelling of unproductive or destructive forces into socially condoned and often constructive activities, which is, of course, a much more mature defence.

Another example of sublimation, more pertinent to ambition, is the person with sadistic or even homicidal urges who joins the military to provide an outlet for these urges, or who, like Justice Wargrave in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), becomes a judge who doles out the death penalty to murderers. In the novel’s postscript, a fishing trawler dredges up a bottle just off the Devon coast. The bottle contains the confession of the late Wargrave in which he reveals a lifelong sadistic temperament juxtaposed with a fierce sense of justice. Although he had longed to torture, terrify, and kill, he could not bring himself to harm innocent people: so instead he became a hanging judge and thrilled at the sight of convicted (and guilty) people trembling with fear.

In life, few things are either good or bad. Rather, their good and bad depend on what we are able to make out of them. People with a high degree of healthy ambition are those with the insight and strength (strength that is often born out of insight) to control the blind forces of ambition, that is, to shape their ambition so that it matches their interests and ideals, and to harness it so that it fires them without also burning them or those around them. The highest understanding, born out of humility, is perhaps that it is not necessary to be ambitious to be high-reaching, or indeed to feel alive.

People shrink or expand into the degree and nature of their ambitions. Ambition needs to be cultivated and refined, and yet has no teachers.

Read more in Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.