3 Types of Ambition: Why You Haven't Lost Your Drive, You've Just Evolved

There are actually three different types of ambition, but we only ever talk about one of them. But acknowledging all three could make us feel a lot better about our path and more confident in our choices.

Let’s dicsuss:

1. Achievement Ambition – the one we always hear about and think being ambitious always falls into this bucket. Get into a top business school, update your job title to something higher, land a book deal, get a new shiny gold star. Nothing wrong with this one, as long as you're going after achievements that actually mean something to you, not just what you think you should be achieving.

2. Experience Ambition – the drive to live through certain things, often for the sake of the experience itself. Living abroad for a year. Giving van life a go. Pitching your work to a creative agent just to know what it feels like to put yourself out there, regardless of whether you land the deal. Rather than checking boxes, this one’s about expanding what you know is possible for yourself.

3. Process Ambition – the desire to become someone through sustained practice and learning. Starting that craft business to see what you feel like as someone who owns a craft business. Learning to grow your own food. Strengthening your financial literacy. Building sustainable healthy habits for the long term. You're motivated by the transformation that happens through the doing, not necessarily by any external marker of "arrival."

Here's why this distinction matters:

We've built an entire culture that only recognizes the first type. Our LinkedIn profiles, our dinner party conversations, our internal scorecards are all designed to track Achievement Ambition. And when you stop optimizing for those metrics, it's easy to feel like you've lost something essential about yourself.

So many of my peers and I feel like we're losing our grip on our ambitious selves just because we don't care as much about achievement-based goals as we once did.

And I'm not talking about a lazy "I've given up" kind of apathy. I'm talking about an active choice to pursue things that matter deeply but don't come with external validation. The problem is, without a framework for recognizing Experience and Process Ambition, that choice can feel like failure.

It can feel like you're becoming less admirable, less driven, less something than your past self— the one who was "going places." (Just speaking for myself.)

So what changed?

I think it's disillusionment, but not the cynical kind– the clarifying kind.

Somewhere around our early 30s, a lot of us started realizing that the achievement-based metrics we'd been chasing— the ones that looked so good on paper— weren't actually making us feel the way we thought they would. The promotion came with more stress than satisfaction. The prestigious company name on our resume didn't make us wake up excited.

We hit the milestones and found ourselves asking, "Wait, is this it?"

For some of us, especially those who stepped away from corporate environments where ambition was easier to measure, the shift has been particularly disorienting. Without those external markers, how do we know we're still becoming something? How do we know we haven't just... stopped?

I've wondered this about myself constantly. After leaving the corporate world, I chose to prioritize goals like learning to grow my own food, understanding my finances more deeply, and maintaining sustainable routines that actually stick. These things matter enormously to me. But they don't come with job titles or announcements or anyone else noticing.

And that doubt around my own ambition made me question whether I was still the person I wanted to be, or if I'd somehow become a less impressive version of myself.

But here's what I've realized:

Since I've started thinking about Experience and Process Ambition as legitimate forms of drive, I feel just as sure of my forward momentum. Maybe more sure, actually, because I'm not waiting for someone else to validate that I'm moving in the right direction. I can feel it on the inside, and that's enough.

The gold stars are still there if you want them. Achievement Ambition isn't going anywhere, and for many goals, it's exactly the right framework.

But if you've been feeling like you've lost your edge just because you're chasing different things now (things that don't fit neatly into a LinkedIn update or a toast at a dinner party), I want you to know: you haven't lost anything. You've just evolved into a different kind of ambitious.

And this version of you is still going places, too.

This week’s question comes from Ellie, a graphic designer in Austin, TX:

Yesss, Ellie! Among my cohort of freelance/consulting/fraction peers, here are the top places we find interesting gigs to stack on top of other income streams:

• Generalist World newsletter

• Hello Generalist

• Freelancing Females

• Fractional Jobs

• Slack groups specific to an industry (eg. public relations, social strategy, UX designers)

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