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# The Pull of Ambition
- URL: https://www.trentonlaffoon.com/the-pull-of-ambition/
- Published: 2026-07-26T15:16:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-27T04:11:45.000Z
- Author: Trenton Laffoon

There is a kind of ambition that makes you good, and a kind that makes you miserable, and for most of my life I could not tell them apart. They feel identical from the inside. Both wake you up early. Both keep you at the desk after everyone's gone home. Both whisper that you could be better, that the last thing wasn't enough, that there's more in you if you'd just reach. The two are so tightly braided that pulling them apart feels like it might unravel the whole thing — like if you lost the restless one, you'd lose the drive along with it.

So we don't pull them apart. We just call all of it *ambition* and treat it as a virtue, full stop.

The word deserves a closer look. *Ambition* comes from the Latin *ambitio* — literally, a *going around.* In ancient Rome it named the act of candidates walking the city, canvassing, going door to door to solicit votes. From the very beginning, the word carried this double edge: it meant drive, yes, but drive *in pursuit of the crowd's approval.* Ambition was never just the desire to do a thing well. It was the desire to be *seen* doing it well — to have the going-around noticed. That shadow has been attached to the word for two thousand years, and I think we feel it still, even when we don't have language for it.

Because here is the honest thing, the thing that's hard to say out loud in a culture that has turned ambition into an unqualified good: a great deal of what drives creative people is not the love of the work. It's the love of being known for the work. And those are not the same engine.

You can feel the difference if you pay attention. There's a version of making where the work itself is the reward — where you lose track of time, where the problem in front of you is so absorbing that the question of who's watching never comes up. Psychologists have a clinical word for this, *flow,* but you don't need the term to recognize the state. It's the feeling of being fully inside the thing, answerable only to the thing. And then there's the other version, which wears the same clothes: the making that is really auditioning. Where some part of you is standing outside the work, watching yourself do it, already composing the caption, already imagining the response. The work is no longer the point. The work has become a means of collecting something else — attention, status, the quiet reassurance that you matter.

I know this engine intimately because it's the one I ran on for years without realizing it. I would have told you I was pursuing excellence. I was pursuing *evidence* — proof, delivered from the outside, that I was good enough. And the cruelty of that pursuit is that it can never be satisfied, because the appetite isn't actually for the work. It's for the approval the work might bring, and approval is a bottomless thing. You hit the goal and the goal moves. The number you wanted becomes the floor you fear falling below. The recognition you longed for lasts about a day and then resets to zero, and you need it again, a little stronger this time, like any tolerance. Ambition of this kind doesn't have a finish line. That's not a flaw in how you're running it. It's the design.

None of this means the drive itself is the problem. This is the mistake the tidy solutions make — the ones that tell you to simply stop caring, to detach, to want less. That advice has never worked for me and I've come to think it's wrong at the root. The drive is a gift. The same intensity that can curdle into status-hunger is the thing that makes you revise the piece a fortieth time, that refuses the easy answer, that stays up wrestling a problem into submission because you cannot stand to leave it unsolved. Kill the drive and you don't get peace; you get mediocrity with a calm face. The goal was never to want less. It was to want the *right thing* — to aim the same engine at a better target.

And that, finally, is where I've had to get honest about what the target has been. Because if ambition is a *going around* in search of the crowd's vote, then the real question underneath it is a question about *audience* — whose approval am I actually working for? Who am I trying to convince? For a long time the honest answer was: everyone. Anyone. Whoever happened to be watching. And an audience like that is a tyrant, because it's fickle and faceless and never the same crowd twice, and you will contort yourself endlessly trying to satisfy a jury that never reaches a verdict.

I have found only one thing that quiets it, and I'll say it plainly, though it took me years to believe it: the pull of ambition loosens its grip only when you become convinced that your worth was never actually up for a vote. That it was settled before you made anything — that you are not auditioning for a place in the world but working *from* one already given. I believe this is true in the deepest sense: that we are made by a Maker who called the making good before we'd produced a single thing, and that this is the ground a person can finally stand on. You don't have to share that conviction to feel the shape of the need it meets. Everyone is looking for a place to set down the exhausting question of whether they're enough. Ambition promises to answer that question through achievement, and it never, ever does — because achievement can't reach the place where the question actually lives.

So I haven't tried to become less ambitious. I've tried to move the drive off of the crowd and onto the work itself, and onto the One I've come to believe the work is ultimately *for.* When it's aimed there, the same energy stops feeling like hunger and starts feeling like devotion. The difference is not the intensity. It's the direction — and, underneath the direction, the audience. Whose vote you're actually going around to win.

I still catch the old pull constantly. I'll finish something and feel my hand reach for my phone before the paint is even dry, wanting to know what the crowd thinks, needing the number to tell me whether it was any good. The reach is automatic; I doubt it will ever fully go away. But I know now what it is. It's the going-around — the ancient, restless canvassing for a verdict that was never the crowd's to give.

And knowing what it is, most days, is enough to set the phone back down and return to the only part that was ever really mine: the work.

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