How Ambition Affects Happiness
Research has foundthat rather than career success leading to happiness, it’s actually the other way around —happinessactually leads to career success. While many of us tell ourselves that we will be happy once we have achieved our goals and realized our ambitions, the reality is quite the opposite: we will not be sustainably successful until we develop a better relationship with our own happiness.
Here’s what the research says on developing a healthier relationship with your ambition — and leading a happier life.
Purpose Heals
Ambition often goes hand-in-hand with competitiveness and the desire to gain power. The need for power or status for its own sake, however, has been shown to be harmful formental health.
Dr. Sheri Johnson, a University of California psychologist who has researched the psychological effects of the desire for status,arguesthat there are two different types of ambition.
In contrast, people with high intrinsic ambition tend to be happier. Intrinsic ambition is the desire for things that don’t depend upon self-comparison, like community, moral purpose, and social connection.
If you’re struggling to find a deeper sense of purpose in your life, the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley offersfantastic resourcesthat can help all of us connect to what matters.
Self-Compassion Encourages Well-Being
Taken to an extreme, ambition can lead to negative self-pressure and self-expectations. When we’re in competition, we’re unsatisfied with our performance and with our current reality.
The catch, however, is that while we think we willfinallybe satisfied when we arrive at the goal — whether that be a promotion, publication, or new house — there is always a new point of comparison, a new milestone to reach. This can lead to a negative pattern of internal self-talk, which can decrease feelings of self-worth.
In contrast,researchers have foundthat practicing mindful self-compassion can increase feelings of well-being. Self-compassion encourages us to accept ourselves, lovingly, as we are, and mindfulness encourages us to find content and succor in the moment. Buddhist teachings, from which modernmindfulness is derived, are based on the idea that human life and everything about it is transitory, and that there is no point in pursuing a goal if upon getting there we merely think about a future goal.
Social worker Allison Abrams, writing forPsychology Today,recommendsseveral exercises that we can all practice to increase our self-compassion and become more mindful in our relationships to ourselves. The Harvard School of Public Health also hassubstantial resourcesfor people interested in learning more about mindfulness and practicing it in their own lives.
Human Connection Sustains Us
There’s a catch-22 to choosing happiness over ambition: after a while, pursuing happiness as a goal can become yet another form of ambition.
Since happiness, in the American context, is often defined as an individual pursuit for self-satisfaction, research has found that valuing happiness as a goal or an end to be achieved can actuallymake us lonely. In contrast, thebulkofresearchsuggests the most powerful thing we can do for our own happiness is to form genuine, caring, mutual relationships with others.
Seeing the people around us as fellow human beings, rather than as litmus tests of our own success or as challenges to overcome, makes us happier.Cultivating healthy relationships is a skill that we can all work on in our competitive, individualistic culture. The Greater Good Science Centers offers free resources onbuilding stronger social connections.
Choosing Happiness Over Ambition
While the fancy language and old-fashioned setting ofMacbethmay have bored you in high school English class, stories like this ask us to reflect on our own lives: What do we want? What is our purpose? If we get what we think we want, will we really be happy?
If you feel the answer is no, it’s never too late to swap some of that ambition for a more mindful and purposeful approach to life. Hey, maybe if Macbeth had chosen to work on his marriage and befriend those other Scottish nobleman rather than murder them, he could have had a happy retirement.
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