How Ambition Serves Your Productivity
Ambition is usually defined as the desire to achieve something, usually something big. We may take about having the ambition to go to the store, but the term usually has larger connotations involving the realization of success, power, wealth.
Some of us have ambition and some of us don't. Even those of us without very much ambition can get things done but those of us with a little more ambition tend to be more productive. This article will talk about how ambition serves your productivity, and why a lack of ambition may be slowing you down.
Ambition affects your productivity by changing the amount of productivity that is required.
If you don't have much ambition and your greatest goal is to pay the rent and fill the refrigerator – this is a judgement-free article, you don't need ambition to be happy – than you may naturally not see the need to put in as much time or effort as you are capable of putting in. Low ambition incites low productivity.
If you do have a lot of ambition and your goal is to be able to put your kids through college before retiring to your home in the country, then you are more likely to see benefit in putting in some late nights or going the extra mile. High ambition incites high productivity.
Having ambition doesn't only change the amount of productivity, it changes the way that you feel about productivity.
The dominant theory about motivation right now is that there is extrinsic motivation and there is intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation is the kind of thing that you do because you must. To use the examples from above, the person who has low motivation is still productive to the degree that they must be, but they are productive because if they are not productive they won't have a place to stay or food to eat. They are working to achieve a reward that it is not necessarily linked to the work that they are doing.
Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is the kind of thing that you do because you enjoy doing it or because you think that the work is valuable or meaningful to you. The person from the above example who wants to earn enough money to put their children through college is working toward a goal that they don't necessarily benefit from in a monetary or material way – they are doing it because they want to or because they think that it is the right thing to do. Their achievements are their own rewards.
Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation aren't mutually exclusive – you don't need to have only one or the other – but they are not always met in the same ways. A person with no ambition probably still has intrinsic motivation, they are just motivated to do things that are not profitable – again, no judgements here.
Ambitious people often find that what they are doing satisfies both extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. The work that they do pays the bills, but it is also work that they consider to be enjoyable or important. This doesn't only mean that ambitious people are likely to put more energy into their work, it also means that less of their energy is divided between achieving extrinsic and intrinsic goals.
Sometimes it can seem like ambition is genetic or that it needs to be learned at a very young age. This isn't true. Sometimes ambition is achieved by finding a way to make your intrinsic motivations and your extrinsic motivations overlap. What's important to you is probably important to other people to and by re-examining your life and your career you might realize that you're more ambitious than you realized.