Do you have ambitions?

[Dias]

I was thinking about it and I realised I don't have ambitions. Or do I and just fail to perceive them?
What are ambitions exactly?
I am a curious person and I like to learn about everything because I always think that one day I may need the info; I like to be independent and to stay like that I must learn enough of everything to be able to handle challenges when they come . Also because I think everything is connected so every information is useful even if I never use it. I also think that one day maybe someone asks me a question and it is always good if we know the answer to help out in some way.
But I don't have ambition to become someone important, chief of a department at work or whatever. On the contrary I like to keep a low profile.
The goals that I have and things I learn and do are mostly for myself. I don't share them with anyone really.
It is just for my personal pleasure and use.
Is this strange? To do things without thinking that no-one else will ever see them, no-one will ever really know us.
How is it for you?
I have no idea how it is in the world with other people. I am most of the time alone and I think I lose track of reality sometimes, although I am very rational and grounded person.

 

[Pats]

I'm the same way. When people talk about goals and stuff I feel out of place. Guess my goal was just to get through life. Never wanted advancement in my career. Actually I'm stretching things to say my career - I just worked to support me and the kids. And worked so I could do stuff when I'm home. No big dreams, and I can honestly say, I've not been disappointed in not meeting my desired goals.
Being ambitious is to work hard to achieve something you desire. What I desire is simple things, so it doesn't take a lot of hard to work to obtain them.
I was a little ambitious today and worked hard to make a bat with leather and wire that looks a little more realistic than those plastic ones. I've got it in my son's shower. Still trying to get even for the snake thing.

 

[Aspychata]

I was thinking about it and I realised I don't have ambitions. Or do I and just fail to perceive them?
What are ambitions exactly?
I am a curious person and I like to learn about everything because I always think that one day I may need the info; I like to be independent and to stay like that I must learn enough of everything to be able to handle challenges when they come . Also because I think everything is connected so every information is useful even if I never use it. I also think that one day maybe someone asks me a question and it is always good if we know the answer to help out in some way.
But I don't have ambition to become someone important, chief of a department at work or whatever. On the contrary I like to keep a low profile.
The goals that I have and things I learn and do are mostly for myself. I don't share them with anyone really.
It is just for my personal pleasure and use.
Is this strange? To do things without thinking that no-one else will ever see them, no-one will ever really know us.
How is it for you?
I have no idea how it is in the world with other people. I am most of the time alone and I think I lose track of reality sometimes, although I am very rational and grounded person.

l feel exactly the same way, l have a burning desire to know and understand everything, but l see it as more as a survival need due to childhood where l was treated like a mushroom, (kept in the dark about everything).

 

[Dias]

So ambition is not only when people want to do big things with recognition from others; we can be ambitious in the small things we do for ourselves.
I had never looked at it this way.

 

[Dias]

Aspychata I think that knowing things makes us feel safer and in control as opposed to vulnerable.
When we don't know things we can not prepare in advance and therefore anxiety levels grow.

 

[Aspychata]

@Dias l truly believe that some of us live in more primal mode due to our childhood, and this colors all of our daily interactions more then we admit.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I'm the same way. I have a job as an engineer and my ambition is to keep my job. I don't want to advance to management and I don't want to run things. Like @Pats said, I just want to get through life.

I do have one or two personal goals - one is to finish a program to perform some new math that I've been working on for two years. Yet, with that ambition, I haven't worked on it for the last 4 months, for two reasons: 1) My ambitions come and go. When I feel the urge to work on it so I can "accomplish something", I do. When I don't feel the urge, I don't care about it. 2) I've been in "survival mode", just getting through the obligations of work and family and not doing much else. 2 may be the cause of 1.

My other personal goal is to someday, maybe, get a math degree. Add the same 1) and 2) from above.

My long-term goal is to make it to retirement without breaking down.

 

[Judge]

Nope. I had to surrender them when I got my AARP card.

But I still wanna go out on a night of heavy drinking with Katy Perry and Jennifer Lawrence. Does that count?

 

[invisibility003]

I guess my ambitions would be to survive life, like you said. And be nice to others and help other people struggling in some way too, even if they're strangers because strangers have saved my life more than once so I kind of owe it to them to help others and survive...And I'd like to get the world and society to think differently about people they consider weird and different as well and be more accepting of them.

 

[tducey]

I hav ambitions. My ambition, right now is to get back to work.

 

[Major Tom]

Nope, other than making it through another day.

 

[Mia]

Did have some ambitions when I was a child, but they were based in books and movies and music. Wanted to dance and sing and be in musicals Later it was to be in the olympics.

That desire quickly went away when I went to school at a higher level and discovered I had no desire to be on a stage with people staring at me.

Then, when I finished school it was to work, and my ambition became selling as many pieces of commercial art as I could of both my own and other peoples. To make enough income that I didn't have to worry all the time about bills, food and rent on both my apartment and the art studio.

Then it was eventually to develop a following, a core group of customers at the bistro I ran, so that if it was a quiet friday night, it wouldn't be like that all the time. And the core clientele would show up at breakfast and lunch and dinner and keep the restaurant afloat.

After all that, it was my ambition to eventually have a peaceful life outside a city, to work in my garden, read books, make soups and healthy meals, cycle in the summers and a little in the winter. Snow shoe, do taekwondo and yoga, do art that I like and tinker and make things. All of my ambitions have been fulfilled, so I have to figure out what the next one is.

Then again, maybe having no ambition has a nice ring to it at this point in my life.

 

[Aspychata]

Did have some ambitions when I was a child, but they were based in books and movies and music. Wanted to dance and sing and be in musicals Later it was to be in the olympics.

That desire quickly went away when I went to school at a higher level and discovered I had no desire to be on the stage with people staring at me.

Then, when I finished school it was to work, and my ambition became selling as many pieces of commercial art as I could of both my own and other peoples. To make enough income that I didn't have to worry all the time about bills, food and rent on both my apartment and the art studio.

Then it was eventually to develop a following, a core group of customers at the bistro I ran, so that if it was a quiet friday night, it wouldn't be like that all the time. And the core clientele would show up at breakfast and lunch and dinner and keep the restaurant afloat.

After all that, it was my ambition to eventually have a peaceful life outside a city, to work in my garden, read books, make soups and healthy meals, cycle in the summers and a little in the winter. Snow shoe, do taekwondo and yoga, do art that I like and tinker and make things. All of my ambitions have been self fulfilled, so I have to figure out what the next one is.

Sounds like a beautiful life....

 

[Mia]

Sounds like a beautiful life....

Sometimes, it's the best revenge.

 

[JDShredds]

I definitely identify with the OP.

Ambition is an interesting thing. I have a kind of evolving perception of what it means to me now, so I'm not sure I can even fully articulate it. What I do know is me as a teenager had a much different idea of ambition than the me of today with twice the life experience.

Whatever it is, sadly (or not sadly) I have way, way less ambition now than I did back then. Why its a bit sad is... I've not really accomplished a lot of what I want to accomplish in life, yet the energy and urge isn't there like it used to be. Ambition is starting to feel pointless and fruitless.

At this point, my biggest ambition is to find a way to live my life meaningfully and independently without being slave to "the workforce," and doing so in a way that my Aspie self can manage on the day to day.

I can't say I'm overly hopeful these days.

 

[Aspychata]

Maybe we all end up redefining ambition, l certainly have.

 

[Fino]

*graduates*
Everyone: "what are you gonna do now!?"

Uhh, same thing I've been doing... continue living.

I guess people see things as Ends. I don't strive for things with all that much intent so when it happens it's just another thing that's incidentally happened.

My ambition is to feel calm and content, I think.

 

[Suzanne]

My ambition is to lower my anxiety levels when I have to change my routine.

I have never been ambitious and like you, I rather a low profile.

It is hard enough being me, to think about being successful outside in the world.

 

[Progster]

My ambition right now is:

1. To complete my discographies of certain select bands and to collect as many prog rock releases as humanely possible (a slow process because I don't earn much), and:
2: To live long enough to see this happen.

 

[SusanLR]

As a teen and into my twenties my ambition was to be very wealthy.
Not for the sake of money or power, but, to be able to build my own world in a place
I wanted to live.
Again, this was based on not wanting to go out into the world to live as I desired.
Enough money you could have anything you would want from the world in your own world.
And New Zealand was the place I want to do that.

Well, that was more like a fantasy because I lacked the ambition to do what it would take to
achieve that much wealth, (unless I won the lotto.)
So it never happened.

Now I just want a simple life away from the city.
No mansion, rather a small hobbit house I call it or a studio apartment in an isolated area.
And, yes, survive another day.