"You lack ambition!" is an insult in some circles. I don't think it has ever been hurled at me directly, but it would be quite true, from some perspective. Meeting ambitious people who seem to know exactly what they want to achieve often alientates me. How can they be so certain? Havn't they just gotten an idea stuck in their head that consumes them?

There is mental freedom in not being as ambitious as others, at least if one manages to let go of feelings like envy, when the inevitable happens that someone "outcompetes" you.

Then again, "being ambitious" (or not) is just another one of the stories we tell ourselves. One of those stories that altogether make up our identity. While it is not fully arbitrary, genes and experiences play an important role, the story can be changed. The internal monologue and the picture of oneself that it upholds is malleable. What would happen, if I just picked an ambition and ran with it for a while, without questioning?

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Poetry is generally not for me but I can get behind good prose that almost feels like poetry, for example Ambition by David Whyte which begins like this:

Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The full piece is best listened to in the author's own fantastic voice (9min). Text version here.