A note on dysfunctional ambition

What does success and happiness look like to you? If you're like me, then your default is to imagine yourself as a tenured professor at a top-tier research university. If you're too much like me (or how I used to be), then this is the only thing that comes to mind: your perceived single path to future happiness. I used to think and worry and then think some more about the future, to the point that one of my MA professors gently told me I had to "chill out." And he was right - why obsess over things either outside of my control or in the too-distant future? Perhaps it was driven by some internal defense mechanism or insecurity (or both), but its manifestation is what I called "ambition." I was constantly spending nights in the grad student office, making sure to do well in my master's program so I could get into a great doctoral program, and then supposedly repeat that until landing a tenure-track job at a great school, and again repeat for tenure. Yet, at the same time, I wasn't making commensurate progress.

In fact, this ambition towards perfection became dysfunctional. Infatuated with the idea of perfection, I didn't want to share my works-in-progress with others, ask questions in class, or share my frustrations and failings - all which would have helped me academically and mentally. In locking my sights on that esteemed tenure-track professorship, I lost vision of other opportunities for success and happiness in the periphery. During my master's program, I wish I would have remembered how much I liked running and creative projects and reading fantasy novels. And I wish I would have internalized that - surprise - not all paths to success mandate that you achieve your dream job. Most of all, I wish I would have known that dysfunctional ambition toward one thing (a career) means ignoring or discarding ambitions for other things that would have made us happy and successful otherwise.

I have since taken on a more functional approach to ambition: rather than letting any single ambition consume me, I keep stock of what's right in front of me and improve myself little by little. The future will work out (because it has to work out), so I'll just worry about what I can immediately control and chill out.