Does Less Ambition Make You Happier – But Also Less Useful?
Ambition, as we have seen this week, can be a mixed blessing. Edison said poignantly, “If I had not had so much ambition and not tried so many things, I probably would have been happier, but less useful.”
Is that the tradeoff: Give up happiness for being useful? Do you think Edison’s ambition was for being useful or for fame, fortune, accomplishment itself, or for the challenge of inventing things to solve problems?
Is your ambition useful or counter-productive? Has ambition ever gotten in the way of your happiness? Again, don’t limit your thinking about ambition to power, money or the like.
As with all things, ask yourself the question: “How does this quality (of ambition) both serve and mis-serve me? The winning approach is balancing out those answers to something that works well for you.
Echart Tolle in his book A New Earth talks about doing that comes out of being and he suggests that any other kind of doing has some distortion that will be expressed in some way and create imbalance. Doing coming out of being allows us to be a vessel for a higher vision that can be expressed to us in a moment to moment unfolding. There is a beautiful mystery to that unfolding and knowing that in spite of whatever kinds of plans or aims we may have, that we are open to an unfolding of something far more creative and full of possibilities that our mental capacities and constructs would have access to and that we are actually collaborating and co-creating with the universe and all the possibilities around us.
Ambition would tend to get in the way of the above. Better the qualities of intention and commitment.