Blind Ambition vs. Earned Ambition

In a recent conversation, I attempted to help a colleague understand how to use deserving leadership principles to achieve their career goals. It occurred to me that we were talking about the difference between blind ambition and earned ambition.   

Earned ambition is a determination to succeed, usually with high motivation and energy. Blind ambition is a desire that lacks clear vision, planning, or orientation. Earned ambition can be helpful in positively accomplishing objectives, while blind ambition could result in confusion, irrational actions, bad decisions, and unnecessary and potentially harmful stress levels.

Ambition often encompasses the aspiration to work towards a goal that requires concentration, dedication, and hard work. Ambition plays a critical role during difficult times on the path to success, as it keeps one's focus on the end goal. However, blind ambition is essentially ambition that has lost its focus and can be highly detrimental. So, what does this imply? There's a sense of personal growth and learning in ambition as it is central to every life's path. Blind ambition, however, generally indicates a reckless pursuit of the end goal devoid of any regard for the experiences and incidents that occur in between.

So how can you achieve your goals using deServing leadership principles and avoid the typical traps of blind ambition? Here are a few tips:

Maintaining Balance: You must balance having a clear idea of the strides you want to make and maintaining dedication. However, acknowledge that not every action needs to serve your ambitions. Taking some time off or carving out time for self-care and nurturing relationships can be acceptable and necessary.

Eliminating noise: It can often seem easy to gain attention or power by getting involved in office politics, gossip, or conversations power. Deserving leaders must focus on the goal and avoid all irrelevant noise. Participating in the noise fosters a lack of trust, toxicity, decreased productivity, and loss of talent.   

Blind ambition can be interpreted as a longing that lacks guidance, understanding, and readiness. It can spawn confusion, encourage poor decisions, and turn the quest for achievement into a display of illogical actions.

Elevate others: A core deServing leadership principle is that to lead, you must first be willing to serve. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, achieving your goals while helping others achieve theirs while being aligned with the organizational culture is one of the most fulfilling ways to achieve your goals. There is no better characterization of blind ambition than ambition without caring for others. Not caring about who gets the credit can lead you to your goals faster.  

Set realistic goals:   Ambition and success are journeys, not destinations. Understanding the steps necessary to achieve your ambition is crucial to your success. There are no shortcuts to ambition. We all have aspirations and dreams, but the journey can often be as meaningful as achieving them. 

Focus on the journey: Embrace personal growth and learning in ambition, as it is central to every life's path. Acquiring knowledge and wisdom along the way is crucial to sustainable success. By exclusively focusing on your dreams and ignoring everything else, you risk bypassing experiences that give life its worth.

Be humble: Accepting feedback is a way to grow in your beliefs and become more mature in your actions. Accepting that you have areas for improvement and focusing on them is a massive part of achieving your goals. Value the people who provide constructive feedback. It means they see a problem that I can't, and they have enough respect for me as a person to let me know about it. As Ben Franklin famously said, "Critics are our friends. They show us our faults."

Achieving your destination can be significant, but life isn't just about the final accomplishment but also your journey. Ambition becomes inherent and natural when you focus on continuous improvement, acquiring knowledge and wisdom, elevating others, eliminating the noise, and maintaining balance.