The Monthly Round-Up: June 2026
Ideas on becoming consciously ambitious and thriving in life and work
Right Ambition: “But boy, I love to work, don’t you?”
Some of us love to work, as this article alludes to along with Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada 2. And that’s okay.
I have a value of “workcentrism,” as Suzy Welch has labeled it in her Values Bridge assessment. It’s defined as: “Workcentrism reflects how much you want work to be the organizing principle of your life—by choice. For some, work is a source of identity, purpose, and fulfillment, shaping not just days but sense of self. For others, it’s simply a means to an end. And for many, the deeply-felt importance of work’s centrality falls somewhere in between.” So while here at Sustainable Ambition I champion considering life and work together, I think it’s important for each of us to align with our own values and choose how much our work takes center stage. I happen to value both workcentrism AND eudemonia (how much someone aspires to organize their life around pleasure). There’s a conflict there—yep, trade-offs always have to be made. And so it is in life. I believe it’s best to look those trade-offs square in the eye and make conscious choices around them. Even better is to design a solution that let’s you have it all, even if it’s a unique solution (e.g., periods of work centrism and periods of sabbatical). And if not, may we learn to find peace in our choices, dialing in to what is best for us at this time.
Right Time: “Escaping the Prison of Time and Work”
David Whyte strikes again! In contrast but not conflict to the above statement about workcentrism, in this piece, he shares a beautiful reflection on how we can be with our time—day to day, hour to hour. To be more present to it and not fight it, but rather to honor it and live in the rhythms and cycles. As he closes, “In the hours is the secret to the workday, and in every workday the manner of our marriage to the hours and subsequently, our journey through the day, is crucial to the happiness we desire.”
Right Effort: Is Your Work Worthy of Your Effort?
Nearly half of employees report increased workloads and an accelerating pace of change. The last thing any of us can afford is doing hard work that doesn’t make an impact.
Happy to share my latest Fast Company article: 5 signs you're doing work that doesn’t matter — and how to redirect your effort toward what actually creates value.
I find that ambitious people aren’t afraid of effort, but they want it to count. Real value comes from both organizational impact and personal growth. When either is missing, it’s a signal to check in and redirect.
“Procrastination is not what it seems… What looks from the outside like our delay; our lack of commitment; even our laziness may have more to do with a slow, necessary ripening through time and a central struggle with the core realities of any endeavor to which we have set our minds. To hate our procrastinating tendencies is in someway to hate our relationship with time itself, to be unequal to the phenomenology of revelation and the way it works its own quiet way in its very own gifted time, only emerging when the very qualities it represents have a firm correspondence in our necessarily struggling heart and imagination.”
— David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
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Sustainable Ambition offers a strategic approach for pursuing our professional and personal goals in a way that is motivating, meaningful, and manageable from stage to stage, rather than be all consuming in a way that compromises other important aspects of our lives or sacrifices our well-being.