Sustainable Ambition Forum - 8.29.23
Are ambitions good or bad? How about expectations?
When I started my work on Sustainable Ambition, I thought that both ambition and expectations tended toward the bad. But as I dug into the research, I found that both live in the realm of being neither good nor bad. Or rather, both can be good and bad.
Ambition can be good in that it motivates us to strive for what we want in life. Ambitions result in what we’d expect—a level of success. But unhealthy ambition and striving has consequences and downsides. We might overwork, leading to burnout, or we might focus on certain goals to the detriment of other aspects of life that contribute to happiness, like positive relationships. For me, ambition takes a dialing in to getting it just right… for you.
Expectations are the same. I tend to think external expectations have negative consequences. Yet, research shows that expectations that are positive—such as when someone believes in you to be able to do more than you might think yourself—leads to us achieving more than we thought possible. Expectations are even more squirrely than ambition. There’s a lot of nuance to them.
Both of these topics are what I got a chance to explore with my podcast guests this month, which you’ll see featured below. With Irena Smith, we talk about how success and expectations impact the younger generation and what Irena’s story, her experience in working with young people applying to college, and her own family experience have influenced her thinking on success. With my good friend, Wade Brill, we dive into expectations. You’ll hear how we wrestle with the topics of ambition, goals, and expectations. Expectations now are showing up all around me, meaning I’m hearing a lot of different voices on how they show up and impact who we are and how we behave in the world. I hope you’ll check out those conversations and get some new insights for yourself.
Based on inspiration from the interviews, here are a few inquiries to consider as you prepare to head back to work next month:
Are any of your current ambitions not serving you? How might you need to realign an ambition to make it more sustainable?
Are there any expectations that you are holding for yourself or that you feel have been externally placed on you that aren’t serving you well? What might it look like for you to loosen their grip?
What might it look like to define success on your terms?
What do you want to strive for around which you feel most capable?
As we approach Labor Day next week, my hope is that you’ll hold onto the summer vibe. Living on the West Coast in what I call fog-ville, I always look to hold onto summer through September and October when we experience our warmest weather. Here’s inspiration from two prompts I used in my summer book workshops (inquiries I asked with my guests) and a good challenge to help you think about locking in the good of summer:
What is something you love about summertime, perhaps that you delight in that helps sustain you? For me, it’s been enjoying summer fruit with vanilla ice cream. Yum!
What’s been your favorite sustaining activity so far this summer? For me, it’s been spontaneous dinners with friends and family.
Now the challenge: How can you hold onto these sustaining activities, perhaps reimagined, as you go into the last four months of the year?
Here’s to defining success on your terms and sustaining ourselves!
Warmly,
Kathy
Founder of Sustainable Ambition
Come Behind the Book with My Final Summer Workshop: Note New Date!
This next workshop will be held: Thursday, September 14th at 12-1:30 pm PT / 3-4:30 pm ET
I’ll offer another lens of Sustainable Ambition and share tools around the third pillar, Right Effort, to put Sustainable Ambition principles into practice.
This is the second of two workshops on Right Effort. In this one, as we head back-to-work post the core of summer, we'll explore how we can be smart about focusing our effort. We'll also look at our ambitions and explore where to put in the hard work.
I’d love to have you join me on Th 9/14! Get it on the calendar here.
Can’t attend this workshop, but want to be involved in the book journey? Join in here.
A reminder that the workshops are FREE and in exchange I would simply love your feedback with a short survey and feedback in the session to help me ensure the content is helpful and usable for yourself and others. 🙏
I hope to see you soon!
The Monthly Round-Up: You+Life+Work
The liberation of mistakes. I was going to write, “The liberation of failure,” but I feel like failure can be a triggering word for some. But this idea of liberation from when we might get things wrong has come up for me over the years, and I find it a helpful way to think about reframing when things might not go quite our way. For example, I remember hearing Yo-Yo Ma say that he welcomed the first mistake he makes in a performance, because then he can be free. He doesn’t have to operate from a state of worry that he’s going to get something wrong. I mean—that’s coming from Yo-Yo Ma! Then one of my favorite quotes is from Oprah who said: “Failure is life just pushing you in another direction.” Yep. Oh, that didn’t work. It must mean I’m supposed to go in a different direction. And then I loved listening to Molly Bloom, author of Molly’s Game and who was the focus of the movie of the same name, with Simon Sinek on his podcast. This is a theme they discuss, as well, and it’s beautiful to hear her talk about her redemption story, if you will. She owns her mistakes and has stepped into a new life. How might you be able to see mistakes or failure with a new light that might actually make it a success on your terms?
The benefits of fun and play. I’ve always struggled with the idea of focusing on solely cultivating happiness, simply because I think it sets unrealistic expectations that we’ll be happy all the time when the reality is we experience all kinds of emotions. So, I appreciate how there’s been more focus of late to instead focus on adding fun and play to our lives to build resilience and reduce stress. This is a good article that offers tips to do just that. I like both the idea here to schedule fun and play and the idea of figuring out how we can integrate both into everyday activities.
📚 Reading: Featured Book from our Guest
The Golden Ticket, A Life in College Admissions Essays, by Irena Smith: There are many layers to Irena’s story. For me, it’s a call to allow for many definitions of success, as we are not all the same. That ambition doesn’t look one way and that relentless striving comes with costs. It’s a story that shows that life is unpredictable and beautiful within that. And, it’s a story of parenthood and parenting, of love, of wanting the most and best for your children.
Many of Irena’s insights don’t apply solely to young people. In fact, from my perspective, many of the college application questions in her book are good self-reflection questions for us older folk, too, and the questions Irena raises are important for us to consider as we continue to shape and grow our notions of success throughout our lives.
The book is a beautiful memoir that you will likely take more away from, too. Learn more here.
🎙️ Listening: I was surprised by this conversation. One might not expect that a person who runs a business for the wealthy would have a different definition of success than the norm, but Ray Flemings, co-founder and CEO of Myria, a company that provides concierge services to fewer than 100 elite clients with a combined wealth of over $400 billion, does. In this episode of The Knowledge Project, Fleming shares his insights on the opportunity to view wealth and success differently.
🎥 Watching: Talk about Sustainable Ambition... Love him or loathe him, Tom Cruise is a role model for keeping his career alive from decade to decade. I recently enjoyed the latest Mission: Impossible flick. Entertaining enough and impressive that at 60 years old Tom is still willing to take risks with his stunts (that might be taking good risk a bit too far, though.) 🤷 😀
The Sustainable Ambition Podcast
Join me for conversations with experts, authors, and friends on what it means to live with Sustainable Ambition.
🎙️ E112: Helping the Next Generation Redefine Success on their Terms with Irena Smith
“I think success is being kind of at the top of what you're capable of, however, you define that, not how other people define it. And I think that falling prey to what you perceive to be successful, as seen through the lens of popular culture, or other families or other kids, is a sure way not to be successful.”
My guest, Irena Smith, offers wisdom and advice from her years of experience working with college applicants and her own life experience in her memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays. In our conversation, we explore the impact and consequences of well-intentioned expectations, be it if they are parental or societal, and we cover the topics of ambition, striving, success, finding one’s spark, and more.
Listen on your favorite player here or on our website here
🎙️ E113: Navigating the Intersection of Ambitions and Expectations with Wade Brill
“We have to slow down to notice where the pressure of the expectation is coming from.”
What lies at the intersection of ambition and expectation? That’s what Wade Brill and I explore in this episode. Expectations are tricky to manage and can cause a lot of suffering. If you’ve been struggling with managing expectations of yourself or from others, this episode is for you.
Listen on your favorite player here or on our website here
You can also find the podcast, subscribe, and listen on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, and more. Get it here.
The Monthly Progress Practice
At the beginning of each year, we share our Monthly Progress Practice. Progress is made through small, consistent action. We offer a monthly practice of small actions or inquiries to inspire positive change this year. Practice makes progress.
Our guidance for August (and to take into September) — Economize. Ambitions aren’t created equal. Dial in your effort and align it to each goal depending on how much it matters to you or how good you want to be.
“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
— Alexander Pope
“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
― Bruce Lee
“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be.”
― Stephen R. Covey