Our rational minds will calculate the best way to achieve our goals, but why do we have those goals in the first place? We don’t often stop to consider this question, because it’s easier to take our motivations for granted.
Certainly, some of our drives are merely biological. We crave food, sex, and sleep because of hormonal systems that create urges that are more basic than emotion. Ambition is more complex than that.
Ambition is the desire to achieve more than what’s necessary, for no other purpose than to prove ourselves capable of the achievement. People speak of having specific ambitions, things they would like to accomplish, but the emotion of ambition is more abstract than that. It’s something akin to the famous response of George Leigh Mallory, when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: Because it’s there.
Ambition can lead to impressive accomplishments, but just as often, it is a destructively delusional emotion, leading people to sacrifice things of great value in the pursuit of a singular focus. This was the case for Mallory, who never reached the peak of Everest. His mummified body was found six decades after his attempted climb, along with evidence that he had suffered a devastating fall.
