Ambition and Expectation

Paradise by Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1530

Over the past couple of months, I've frequently found myself saying things like they just didn't try hard enough and obviously they have a limited imagination. These are really quite new mindsets for me, especially the latter one. I am historically a pessimist, and a calculated one at that. I always looked for some rationale that something worked, often based upon what I believed to be a physics-engine limitation.

But I've overwritten that part of my brain. I now contain boundless optimism, unconstrained by what can be perceived as reality. There are actually few things that can prevent you from achieving everything you ever want. The trick is to have a good handle on your wildest desires and have the right expectations for fulfilling them.

Often, when people write off their actions as a failure, it's because they were attached to achieving their goals in a particular way. And when their expected path changes, they feel that their ambitions are blown to bits.

Did you really want to run a newspaper, or were you just fed up with your old boss and the perils of the publishing industry, so you decided you'd stick it to the man? If running a newspaper was the end goal, you would focus less on proving something (still an important motivation) and do everything you could to keep the paper alive. That's tough. It's much easier to draw personal satisfaction from sticking true to your ideals (which are informed by groups) than it is to feel good about being successful.

If you can strike the right balance of ambition and expectation, you'll never really let yourself down. A heuristic: the grander yor ambition, the less attached you should be from the journey unfolding in a particular way. The more you expect, the more fragile your dreams become.

This might sound gloomy, but remember I declared optimism up front. You can try hard, but you have to get creative in your pursuit of success, even more so if you're trying to live up to the expectations you've laid down for yourself. That's tricky in a hyperrational world, but it's possible.

We're all trained to see the world a certain way, with very little deviation. This is helpful when you are contributing to another's ambitions. But when you're trying to go out on your own, to push boundaries and fulfill your own desire, you need new ways of seeing. Few people are true visionaries in this sense, but lucky for the rest of us, seeing is a skill, it just needs to be exercised.

I wish I had a manual for expanding horizons. There are many techniques, but I think it is composed of a spiritual aspect and a physical aspect. Maybe they are necessarily separate, maybe not. I guess only time will tell.