Living Without Ambition

Once upon a time, there were two guys. One guy was called "Renaissance Man." The other guy was "Zen Master." Both were interested in living fulfilling and happy lives, but they had different ideas and strategies about what constituted the good life.

Renaissance Man was very ambitious. He kept a notebook, and he made lists of all the things he wanted to accomplish. He held nothing back in this endeavor. Once he was done, he had an impressive list of projects to tackle, and he was enthusiastic about it all. So, he began trying to achieve these ambitions. He put together To Do lists, and he motivated himself with posters and audio recordings and books from motivational speakers. But as Renaissance Man did more, he became frustrated. He accomplished some things, but these accomplishments were dwarved by his ambitions. He struggled to get more out of himself and to be more productive. He envisioned his future self enjoying the culmination of his ambitions. But the more he tried, the more he ran headlong into the fact that he didn't have enough time, money, and energy to pull it off. Despite being ambitious, he was a failure.

Zen Master was not ambitious. He fixed a few bad habits and spent his days pursuing modest goals. He needed no motivation because he enjoyed his activities. He found he had the time, money, and energy to fulfill his desires. This was because he had lessened his desires to the minimum. He wanted few things, and he was able to get what he wanted.

Now, the question we must ask is this. Who was successful? Is it the one who failed to attain ambitious goals? Or is it the one who achieves modest goals?

Success is defined as achieving a desired outcome. There is no normative standard for success. It is always relative to those desires which are different for each person. It does not matter if the desired outcome is ambitious or humble. Success is the attainment of the outcome. This simple definition indicates a strategy. The easiest way to become successful is to have modest desires. This is the kernel of the minimalist philosophy. You will find this in traditions from Epicurus to the Stoics to practitioners of Buddhism.

Failure is defined as not achieving a desired outcome. The one thing all failures have in common is ambition. This would be the actor waiting tables in Hollywood in the dashed hope of being the next Brad Pitt. Being ambitious does not make a person successful. In fact, the moment ambition is born that person is a failure until the outcome has been achieved. The ambitious person lives almost entirely in the future. Until that future comes, life is frustration and grief.

Some people will argue that ambition has been the fuel for great things. We think of Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic or the moon landing as the fruits of ambitious undertaking. But Columbus discovered the New World by accident. Penicillin was the result of one man's poor housekeeping in the lab. The fact is that many accomplishments come by accident as much as by ambition. Impotence was cured in the failure to remedy male pattern baldness. Potato chips were invented by a smart ass trying to piss off a customer.

So, should we proceed along the path of deliberation or the path of chaos? It doesn't really matter since both yield desirable outcomes. With the chaos method, the desire is ex post facto. We draw the target around where the arrow has landed. The irony is that ambition and deliberation could cost us an even more desirable outcome than the one desired.

Some would say that we should live without goals, but this is not possible. Everything we do implies a goal. If you take a shower, the goal is to get clean. If you eat food, the goal is to alleviate hunger. We see from this simple logic that all human action is goal oriented.

An ambition is distinct from a goal because it is an earnest desire to achieve something. This desire is above and higher than a mere desire. My goal might be to make myself breakfast. My ambition may be to open a restaurant that serves breakfast. One is hardly worth mentioning while the other is a big deal. A goal is immediately served by reality while an ambition is created in the mind long before it finds itself in the world. Unfortunately, most ambition remains at this mental stage. As such, an ambition is an unfufilled desire. This is why ambitious people are called "dreamers."

The other irony of ambition is that when the ambition is reached it is never satisfying. This is what the writer of Ecclessiastes referred to when he said, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." The author of that work attained what he desired, but it left him empty. Things are never as good as we dreamed them. Why is this?

All ambition is fundamentally a desire that is contrary to reality. Ambition is frustration and disappointment both along the way and in the completion. The joy and thrill of ambition comes from the dreaming. If you doubt this, consider the man who prefers spending his days with pornography as opposed to his flesh-and-blood girlfriend. The fantasy is preferable to the reality. Ambition is simply a fantasy.

The person with great dreams and plans is akin to the porn addict. The pleasure comes more from the dreaming and the planning than the doing. This is why aficionados of self-development achieve so little. It is more fun to plan things than to do those things. Dreams are more pleasurable than reality. The entire industry is like one gigantic dream factory providing many emotional highs about the possibilities that await. But as Oscar Wilde pointed out, there are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it.

Success is simply a desire made real, and the best strategy for success is to limit those desires. This runs counter to the self-development industry with its endless manufacturing of ambition. It is the rejection of ambition in favor of simplicity. This is the heart of the minimalist philosophy. Material excess is a form of ambition. Multitasking is another form of ambition. Ambition is the divorce of goals and reality. The antidote is to live without ambition.

This idea is anathema to a world of self-development that preaches to us that we should fulfill our destinies. We should reach for the stars and never settle for second best and blah blah blah. But I test these things by the empirical standard. Does these people actually accomplish these things? I'm sure some do, but I don't see it among the devotees. I think this approach is misguided and harmful.

All we do or ever will do is limited by reality. For instance, multitasking is the belief that we can multiply time, but the evidence is in on this practice. Multitasking doesn't work. It takes longer to do multiple things at the same time with less satisfactory results. Speaking from personal experience, I've never pulled this off beyond yammering on my cellphone behind the wheel of my car. I've also had enough close calls to now eschew the practice. Now that I pay full attention to the road, I notice all the other people talking or texting behind the wheel. Their driving is extremely poor.

Once you accept the limits of reality, you must by necessity turn to simplicity. The ironic thing is that as you strip away all these desires you feel a certain elation. This is relief. You never noticed it before, but all those desires were weighing you down. You let them go more and more. You decide to cross Everest off your bucket list. You realize that learning seven languages may impress your friends, but you have done just fine in life knowing just one. The Renaissance Man stops being the Renaissance Man and becomes the Zen Master. He empties his cup.

This process of emptying brings peace and serenity. You no longer desire what could be. You desire what is. This is harmony. It does not mean that you cease working, living, or doing important things. But you accept all possibilities with the same attitude. You focus less on the end and more on the process. You let things develop as they must as a consequence of the process. You live in the moment. You live in reality but in a fuller and deeper way.

The main criticism of Zen is that it is based upon a contradiction. You cannot live without all desire since this would be a desire. But Zen is less contradictory than paradoxical. For instance, is it your ambition to win the lottery? For some, it is, and they are sorely disappointed many times. For others more numerate, the answer is no. They do not waste their time on such pipe dreams. Yet, if they were gifted a ticket and won the lottery, would they turn down the winnings? I doubt it. So, do they desire to win the lottery or not? This is the paradox of Zen. The answer is yes and no.

This struck home to me when a coworker of mine said very wise words to me. He said, "There is no such thing as a smooth day at work." This struck me as very profound. The reason is because most of my frustrations on the job come from the ambition of having a smooth day. But this never happens. Every day is a series of problems that must be solved. This is the essence of work. The expectation of a smooth day was unrealistic and brought me grief. So, I let this ambition go. The result is now a smooth day at work. That is the paradox. By giving up the desire, I fulfilled the desire.

We all experience these paradoxes. By living as a pauper, you become rich. By becoming less ambitious, you become more successful. By eliminating the unnecessary, life becomes fuller. By enduring the pain of exercise, you feel better. By having fewer goals, you achieve more. We live Zen more than we realize.

Can you live a life with zero goals and desire? The answer to that is no. This is negation. By focusing on negation, you end up in the very misery you wish to escape. The fundamental thing here is harmony. Harmony is having desire that matches reality. It is not wishing for what should be but accepting what is. The irony is that reality sometimes exceeds what we could have expected.

The way to live without ambition is to reject dreams and go with possibilities. Ambition seeks control, but this control is an illusion. Living with possibilities is being open to different outcomes including the bad and the fabulous. When you live in this way, you experience the opposite of ambition. Where ambition makes life seem frustrating, possibilities make life exciting. Where ambition leads us to outcomes that never live up to expectations, possibilities lead us to outcomes that exceed our dreams. And setbacks aren't so tragic but simply part of the learning curve.

It is difficult for people to let go of ambition and go with possibility. Their minds cannot grasp it. It is too paradoxical and mind blowing. But it does work. We live in times when people have followed the conventional wisdom about ambition. Where has it gotten them? Why are so many with so much so unhappy? And why do we envy people with simple lives? Why has minimalism become so appealing?

To make this practical, living without ambition is very simple. Focus on the process. Don't make it your goal to achieve X, Y, and Z. Just make it your goal to work each day and see what happens. Don't waste time in daydreaming. Just do the work. Lose yourself in the doing. Then, stop and compare this new way of living with the old ambitious way. Do not compare what you could be with what you are. Simply compare your actual ambitious self with this new unambitious self. See if Renaissance Man or Zen Master is better. See who actually achieves more. I can only say that for me going the Zen route has done much more for me.

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