ambition shouldn't be a war with yourself

ambition is within all of us. we all dreamed of the craziest things as kids. my dream as a 5 year old was to play for the chicago bulls. yours might've been becoming a superhero. some of these were unrealistic. but most are achievable. pursuing them shouldn't require killing the person who dreamed them.

that kid who was a dreamer lives within all of us. it’s why we want to break free and live our dream lifestyle.

yet despite all of these dreams, starting feels so difficult. and even after starting something, it’s hard to be consistent. you become consistent for a couple months, but then something pops up and now all the consistency you built up completely falls apart.

why is it so hard? i think it’s because many of us view discipline as an enemy.

turning ambition into reality takes discipline, consistency, and perseverance.

when you do something you’re passionate about or it’s something new, you get in a frenzy and immediately start working on it. you start whiteboarding or have pages of notes about the idea. you tell your friends and they support you because they’ve never seen you this excited. these are the moments when everything “clicks”. it’s usually when you feel completely aligned as a person, which is why you are the most motivated.

but then life happens. things feel hard. you feel tired. part of you wants to keep going, but you just can’t. and the idea you were so excited about a couple days ago remains an idea.

usually because it feels so hard to be consistent and disciplined. there’s an ideal state where you do what you are supposed to every day. but this only works well if you have a routine. when you are doing something ambitious, life feels extremely volatile a lot of the time. so it feels impossible to be disciplined.

so we sprint, and hustle for one day or week to ambitiously build out ideas.

sure, momentum and flow matter. but ambitious bets don’t rely on a singular week (most of the time). they rely on the compounded work over the course of months/years.

people often talk about taking a bet, but not sticking with a bet. sustainable high performance is how you execute on long-term bets. your emotional, mental state directly impact your work and decision making. when you're fully depleted, it becomes easier to make poor decisions. and a series of poor decisions are what can unravel months of work.

in order to do difficult things consistently, you need to align your body, mind, and soul.

think of your soul as an infinite energy source (your why). your mind works as a conductor of energy (your how). and your body absorbs and acts upon that energy (your what).

an instinct of being ambitious is to completely fight against what your mind and body tell you, and thug it out. this works short term, but leads to burnout, leading to way less progress than what you would expect.

keeping this in mind really helped me embrace ambition while being an actual person + hitting goals outside of work.

i really struggled staying in touch with people in the middle of college and keeping them integrated in my life. i was so focused on pursuing work + ambition that it felt impossible to do anything else. i came back every day exhausted and woke up every day exhausted.

i would flake hangouts with friends, be a ghost on texts, and sometimes not even call my family for weeks. people had been my whole world growing up and now they were completely out of it. i would try and consistently hangout every day with people, but would quickly revert back to my old habits.

and even if i did all my habits, i would always still feel like something is missing. every day felt like work. life felt dull.

it’s because i was forcing myself into routines + difficult things fighting against my mind, body, soul.

after realizing this, i stopped letting my ambition kill who i was. i learned how to work with it.

it’s about channeling your excitement about starting something into a plan to ramp up to the ideal state of your habit. it should feel unreasonable to not do it. and whatever it is you decide to do, in the beginning consistency is key. it’s training your mind and body to adapt to something new.

after a certain point, the habit will be there and formed. it’ll feel weird if you don’t do it. now’s the big question: how do I integrate this habit without fighting myself? this is where trust comes in. once again, your mind + body aren’t just things you command around. it’s about working with them to get what you want. so it’s about setting minimum expectations and ideal expectations. you want to build in multiple layers of dopamine and positive feedback loops.

this way if you hit your bare minimum and it was a hard week, you can still tell yourself you did it! if it’s a normal week and you exceeded expectations, it’s a huge dopamine boost.

it also gives you an iterative cycle on how to integrate the habit in your daily life. if you are consistently missing the bare minimum, either it’s not as high of a priority as you thought, your expectations were too high, or you need to deprioritize something else in your life.

for me, there are certain things i wish i can do every day. but i can’t because building phia has been the #1 priority, and certain days my body + mind are depleted. if i force myself too many times in the week, i go into survival mode. survival mode gets the job done, but i lose all other elements of myself while executing. i burn out eventually. you can’t be 100% on everything. in order to pursue something difficult, it requires a compromise.

this seems straightforward with simpler habits like exercise but how does this apply to ambition? it goes back to the principle of you want to try and perform at your best every day. with this, comes understanding when to go 100% vs 80%. there are certain weeks you need to push hard. but it’s acknowledging it’s a hard week and taking time aside to take care of your mind + body. both are things that require nourishing.

alongside daily habits, it’s important to zoom out and put your day-to-day in perspective. your soul doesn’t care about the physical world. it cares about you. it’s that subconscious / personality that defines you. and when ambitious, you’ll face the lows and also have moments where all you are doing is executing. so constantly remind yourself why you do what you do.

how does your day-to-day feed into who you are? how does what you are doing fit into your dream lifestyle? are you proud of your current journey? these are some of the questions that help keep the furnace burning and your energy high.

i truly think by focusing on your mind + body + soul, you will be unstoppable. that kid who was a dreamer is going to be proud of you. so keep being you and make your dreams come true.