Sustainable Ambition

head in the clouds, feet on the ground

As a new coach, I’m sitting with a fundamental tension that straddles both my personal and professional life: how to grow my business and hone my craft while properly resting and caring for myself. At 28, I don’t have the luxuries of a thick rolodex of high net worth client leads, a dense professional network of executives, or a large nest egg to draw from.

The journey from making $0 last year to now feeling a budding confidence has been my greatest teacher. Not being able to instantly declare myself a coach and charge premium rates proved to be an unexpected blessing. Without the cheap convenience of laterally jumping from one high-paying career to another, I’ve had to sit in the depths of uncertainty and liminality, and regularly renew my commitment to this path.

For the first 25 years of my life, I mastered high performance, from academic achievements to corporate metrics, in service of the expectations from others. During my sabbatical year, I stripped away these external measures to discover what genuinely energizes and fulfills me, even without recognition or reward. Now, I'm navigating uncharted territory that neither my years of achievement nor my sabbatical prepared me for. I’m learning to build something meaningful while maintaining balance and integrity.

I'm currently making far less money than before, yet I have more energy, purpose, and ambition than ever. This creates an interesting paradox: less material comfort—and perhaps less pleasure in the hedonistic sense—but a deeper sense of acceptance and aliveness.

Gone are the familiar corporate guideposts of clear metrics and milestones. Instead, I'm venturing into terra incognita. There's no ladder to climb, no leaderboard to top. This raises fundamental questions: What does success look like? How do I want to work? How can I sustain my ambition while enjoying the process?

In wrestling with these questions, I've realized I'm not alone. So many of us face this pursuit of sustainable ambition that demands we question old norms and patterns, ushering in new ways of being. For too long, we've lived by looking outwards - for delicious carrots dangling before us or threatening sticks behind us. We ought to remember that this metaphor originated with cart drivers steering donkeys. As conscious beings capable of complex meaning-making, perhaps it's time we learn to trust our inner compass, finding direction through internal calibration rather than external prodding.

Unlike an ordinary pocket compass, our inner guidance system doesn't just point north—it whispers guidance about pace and interval, adapting as you navigate the ever-evolving world. This magical instrument helps us understand how to build meaningful pursuits in a world fixated on overnight successes and viral sensations. Yet its subtle pulse can easily be drowned out by the clamoring distractions of status games and societal expectations.

Traditional employment doesn't just provide money and meaning. It offers the comfort of knowing exactly what to work on and how hard to push, with guardrails to prevent coasting and incentives to keep ambitious souls striving. While this structure serves many well, those of us pursuing our own path must develop a deeper relationship with our inner navigation system. This compass teaches us the rhythms of engagement - when to sprint and when to rest, how to honor seasonal shifts, and most importantly, how to preserve the empty spaces where possibility lives.

What would it look like to orient our work and lives around purpose and service? What becomes possible when we release ourselves from the tyranny of constant urgency and obligation? How would it feel to cultivate ambition that is healthy and sustainable while still getting real shit done?

To answer these questions, we need to examine the very nature of ambition itself—from its shadow side of burnout to its potential for sustainable vitality. Through my own journey from achievement-driven corporate life to a more intentional, self-directed path, I've discovered several key principles that point toward a new way of working.

Burnout: A Uniquely Human Achievement

Burnout is a peculiar affliction because only humans seem capable of developing it. We are the only species that can somehow overwork ourselves despite having full bellies and roofs over our heads. Every day, animals in the tundra, jungle, and ocean face actual threats of starvation, predation, and disease, yet they don't burn out. This uniquely human disease manifests as a deep psychic exhaustion, stemming from our relentless drive to achieve and perform.

In our modern achievement society, we’ve created an impossible game. The challenge isn't just doing good work - it's finding completion and satisfaction without succumbing to constant self-exploitation and ego overheating. A central question I keep returning to is “How can I work hard on what I care about without the risk of burnout?”

Everywhere I look, I see people trying to do too much. We're collectively overworking to the point where vacations, sabbaticals, and various life crises have become necessary reset buttons. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need breakdowns to have breakthroughs.

Meanwhile, there's been an explosion in self-care and wellbeing advocacy. While well-intentioned, the noble quest for personal growth has been twisted into just another optimization race. Having a therapist, cultivating indoor plants, attending yoga classes, drinking green juice, hitting your daily steps, and even a lil 10 minute meditation have all become boxes to check in the same rat race we're trying to escape.

These observations led me to question the current focus on doing more outside of work to create balance and integration. While this isn't inherently wrong, it sidesteps the core issue - the actual velocity, texture, and ethos of our work itself. Rather than trying to offset unhealthy work patterns with yoga retreats, perhaps it's time to examine and transform the source of our exhaustion.

Understanding burnout's unique relationship to human ambition points us toward its antidote—a new way of working that honors both our drive and our innate humanness. This begins with reimagining the work itself.

Sustainable Ambition: The Work Itself

Understanding burnout as both a personal and systemic challenge pushed me to look deeper at how we structure work itself. While most advice focuses on softening ambition's edges—encouraging the workaholic to prioritize family and hobbies—this approach misses the core opportunity: reimagining the nature of work itself.

The conventional paths seem limiting: either soften your ambition to find balance, or chase money first and meaning later. But sustainable ambition isn't about diluting intensity or postponing purpose. It's about transforming the work itself to be inherently energizing rather than depleting.

My own experience illustrates this shift. I recently started making money on my own for the first time. It's not much, especially compared to my previous tech salary, but there's something fundamentally different about it. Each dollar earned feels more satisfying than any corporate paycheck I've received, because it's directly tied to work I've chosen to do. This path isn't easier—I make real practical tradeoffs every day about what luxuries to forgo. But these tradeoffs come with acceptance and feel worlds apart from my previous life, where I traded my energy and spirit for a comfortable paycheck.

History offers us models of sustainable ambition in action. Consider how others have built work to serve their life: William Finnegan structured his early writing career around surf seasons, creating natural rhythms of intense work and play. He lived off canned food during eight-week surf trips, a stark example of prioritizing what truly mattered to him. Patti Smith designed her days around creative experimentation rather than immediate output, working in bookstores to sustain her artistic evolution. Founder of Nike Phil Knight sold Japanese shoes from his car trunk while maintaining his accounting job. As he put it: "I wasn't trying to get rich. I wanted to win... Business was no mere way to make money. It was a way to be alive."

What strikes me about these pioneers isn't just that they followed their passions—it's how they designed their entire lives around what mattered most to them. They didn't wait for perfect conditions or financial freedom. Instead, they found ways to make work fit their lives, rather than contorting their lives to fit their work. Money wasn't irrelevant, but it became a byproduct rather than the primary driver, allowing for a longer-term view. They stayed flexible and experimental, focusing on the quality of their daily experience rather than racing up some predefined ladder of success

This approach turns conventional career wisdom on its head. Instead of climbing the ladder first and exploring your calling later, it suggests finding work that energizes you now, regardless of the initial financial returns. This isn't about romanticizing struggle—it's about recognizing that sustainability emerges from having a healthy relationship with the work itself. Like a marathon runner finding their optimal pace, sustainable ambition requires discovering a rhythm that you can maintain indefinitely.

When we allow our work to align with our natural energies and values, we tap into a different kind of productivity—one driven by engagement rather than obligation. This creates a virtuous cycle where the work itself becomes regenerative rather than depleting. The secret lies in finding a way of being that persists regardless of your financial situation. This makes money truly an independent variable, allowing you to focus on what matters: the work itself.

Emptiness Creates Possibility

Our culture celebrates perpetual motion, treating every unfilled moment as a missed opportunity. But I've learned that true sustainable ambition requires its opposite - deliberate emptiness. It's about honoring the natural rhythm between doing and being, rather than brute forcing outcomes through sheer effort.

My best ideas emerge not during back-to-back meetings or furious brainstorming, but in the spacious moments between. Like any natural system, creativity requires both input and rest. New insights arise when given room to breathe, not when forced into existence.

Beyond mere productivity gains, this intentional spaciousness creates the necessary conditions for a life worth living. The math is simple: if you only allow yourself enjoyment on weekends, you're spending 71% of your time not enjoying life. The emptiness I'm advocating for creates room to accept spontaneous invitations, pursue sudden curiosities, or simply rest in being.

This tension between space and acceleration played out recently in my own work. After launching my coaching practice and seeing initial progress, my mind immediately raced to "how can I go faster?" This is one of the core challenges of being highly ambitious - the constant urge for more. But sustainable ambition requires accepting that we won't accomplish everything on our ambitious to-do lists - in fact, it would be concerning if we did.

Protecting emptiness requires strong boundaries - saying no becomes as crucial as saying yes. The common belief that more input equals more output ignores how insights actually emerge - through unexpected connections and intuitive leaps that require mental space. Our attention, like any natural resource, needs periods of rest.

Like the ancient Taoist teaching that a room is useful because of the empty space it contains, our lives become most potent not when filled with activity, but when we preserve vital emptiness from which possibilities emerge. This is how we channel our ambition with longevity without sacrificing present-day enjoyment.

Sustainable Ambition Follows Nature's Rhythms

Just as sustainable agriculture follows natural cycles rather than forcing constant production, sustainable ambition requires us to honor our internal seasons. A big driver of burnout in modern work culture is our rigid adherence to consistency across the Gregorian calendar year. Despite dramatic seasonal variations in daylight (up to 8 hours difference between summer and winter), we insist on the same work patterns year-round. From our self-domesticated battle stations of monitors and ergonomic chairs, we continue staring at screens regardless of whether the sun is shining or setting at 4pm.

Nature offers wisdom through its seasonal rhythms. Bears hibernate, Arctic Terns migrate 56,000 miles annually between poles, and whales traverse oceans between feeding and breeding grounds. Traditional human societies understood this too - farmers work intensely during summer planting and fall harvest, while winter provides natural periods of rest. Like nature itself, sustainable ambition requires periods of both intensity and rest.

For the past five years, I've structured my life around natural rhythms, using winter in the mountains as my anchor point. During ski season in the mountains out west, I keep my calendar sparse to follow the snow and weather patterns. As spring emerges, I find myself craving urban energy - seeking out intellectual conversations, delicious Asian food, and the blessed sight of people with actual fashion sense. Summer's extended daylight hours pull me outdoors, while autumn often brings a desire to slow down and reset from prior months of busyness. This seasonal approach allows me to maintain my ambition without depleting myself - each phase feeds and energizes the next.

This way of living creates a different quality of stability than fixed routines. Although I change locations every few months, I rarely travel in-between stays, allowing me to fully settle into each place. It's a misconception that this lifestyle involves constant movement - I often stay more rooted in one spot than friends who maintain year-round city apartments but frequently travel for work, weddings, and vacations.

Each season nurtures different aspects of ambitious work, creating a sustainable cycle of creation and renewal. In the mountains, the quiet and solitude foster deep creative work - writing flows easily when there's nothing to do but watch snow fall. NYC's frenetic energy fuels execution and output. The city is also where I collect raw material - snippets of overheard conversations, chance encounters, surprising connections. Home becomes my incubator, where half-formed ideas finally take shape.

Living seasonally creates resilience through adaptability - a core principle from systems theory. In rigid systems, disruptions create structural damage. But in fluid, responsive systems, perturbations can be absorbed and integrated. By allowing our work patterns to shift with natural rhythms and energy levels, we build sustainability into our ambition.

This isn't about working less - it's about aligning our work with natural cycles of inspiration, action, gathering, and rest. Some seasons I’m running around NYC, meeting new people and absorbing the energy of the city like an artist wandering around the MET in search of inspiration. Other times, I’m back home in hermit mode, finding solace in solitude and books. By flowing with these cycles instead of fighting them, my ambition stays alive without burning out. But embracing this way of working required me to first let go of something else - my attachment to goals.

The Process Shapes Who You Become

Goals used to seduce me with their clarity and certainty. But I've learned that life rarely unfolds according to plan, no matter how detailed or ambitious. I could craft the sexiest, most compelling five-year roadmap, complete with revenue projections and career milestones, but it would say nothing about what I'm actually doing today or who I'm becoming. Plans are just stories we tell ourselves - reality writes its own script.

The book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned" shifted something in me. I now see that goals only serve us when they're immediately achievable or one step away. Beyond that, they often become counterproductive. I've watched peers relentlessly chase promotions, putting their self-worth at the mercy of tunnel vision comparison that ignores the multidimensionality of being a human.

Instead of seeking linear, predicable progress, I've embraced change as my constant companion. This is why I hold the term "coach" quite lightly - I don't constrain myself with modifiers like "career" or "life." The adjacent possible beckons: perhaps towards somatic therapy, deeper yoga practice, or paths I can't yet imagine. My process of becoming requires staying open to change.

This looser grip on outcomes has actually strengthened my work. It's not about abandoning ambition - rather, understanding that action produces information¹. Each step I take reveals new possibilities and insights that no amount of planning could uncover. Our daily choices and behaviors reveal more about who we are than any vision board, New Year's resolution, or LinkedIn profile ever could.

When my ambition was anchored in distant goals, I constantly stretched myself thin trying to bridge the gap between present reality and future dreams. This created a perpetual state of "not enough". But when I focus on engaging fully with my process, each day becomes an opportunity to express and refine it. The sustainability comes from finding satisfaction in the work itself, rather than postponing it until some future achievement.

Head in the Clouds, Feet on the Ground

"Head in the clouds, feet on the ground" has become a mantra for me. While my mind soars with expansive visions of what could be, my feet remain firmly planted in present-day practicality. This isn't just a poetic metaphor—it's a practical framework.

Looking down, I see clear footprints marking my progress through small, intentional actions. Looking up, I glimpse who I might become, though I hold that vision loosely. The middle distance—that span of three months to two years—remains stubbornly blurry and constantly shapeshifting. And perhaps that's exactly as it should be.

This dual perspective serves a vital purpose: my elevated gaze keeps me connected to deeper purpose, while my grounded focus ensures I'm taking concrete steps forward. The magic lies in holding both simultaneously, letting them inform and balance each other. This dance between vision and action is sustainable ambition in its purest form, untainted by mimetic desire or external pressure.

Sustainable ambition isn't about going viral or building the next unicorn startup. It's about creating work that energizes rather than depletes, that compounds over time like a well-tended garden (or the Roth IRA you’re glad you started in college). It's about finding harmony where your visionary dreams meet your daily actions.

We're all searching for that elusive balance - how to dream big without burning out, how to stay ambitious without losing ourselves. I've found my answer in embracing these natural polarities: being both patient and passionate, visionary and grounded, bold and sustainable. By keeping my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground, I can pursue bold visions while staying rooted in what matters most: the daily work of becoming.

What does sustainable ambition look like for you?

---

P.S. If this concept of sustainable ambition resonates, and you’re ready to explore bringing it into your daily life, I’d love to help guide you. Reach out here.

1. Source: Brian Armstrong