12 | How to stay Ambitious and keep your agency
Real talk about ambition - move past the day of mania
How to stay ambitious:
Okay, I’m assuming you have goals. Alright, great perfect, you’re halfway there. Maybe you want to be famous, maybe you want to build a good product for climate change/space travel/living forever/web3, be the mostest firstest greatest “something” there has ever been. Or maybe you want to be a millionaire and don’t really care very much about how you get there. Maybe you have a little voice inside you that you telling you that one day you’ll change the world. Maybe you're already in the process of changing the world and “it’s only a matter of time before everything goes right and the world sees it too”. Maybe you just want to work towards being happy.
How do you sustain your passion for these goals? How do you do increase your ambition healthily? Anyone can have a day of mania, moments where you truly believe you can accomplish “anything you want” so long as you focus and give your all, work smart and hard, expand your surface area for serendipity, etc. Talk to strangers, write publicly, build side projects – do those things without an immediate reward that alchemize luck. But how do you stay in that headspace? How do you pursue what you want with all your heart, keep your mental-health healthy and not fall into a wallowing pit of self-pity, misery, and despair when you miss a target, or two, or three - one habit, two habits, three habits, consecutively? How do you keep moving forward?
Surround yourself with hungry people
Environment is key. Seriously. If you surround yourself with other people who push themselves to aim higher, push themselves for more, you’d be hard pressed not to be able to do the same. It’s the best mind-fuck/mind-hack way to integrate ambition into your everyday life. This can start with curating the content you consume - in this day and digital age, instead of the 5 average people we surround ourselves with, we’re the 5 creators we consume the most content from.
That’s great news! it’s an easy thing you can control that has a great RoI.
So points of action:
- Follow people who inspire you and people you want to be like
- Unfollow people you don’t want to be like (if they’re your friends then just mute them or something)
Usually from there on, you’ll be able to find an online community or like-minded people or something of that sort. It’s not always possible to surround yourself in real life with other people working towards the same goal as you are but if you curate your digital feed so that it directs you towards your goal, when you feel unmotivated and sad (and you will), having people who are around you who believe you and motivate you makes it 10x easier to push yourself.
If every tweet you see on your timeline keeps hammering into your head the importance of “cold-emailing people you think are interesting”, “writing online” and the importance of “setting big audacious goals”, then eventually I really do think that your subconscious will bully you into following their advice. Or inspire you. Whichever verb you find more appealing.
Example 1: One afternoon, I decided to join Synthesizer Skool and sign myself up for a challenge where everyone made content for 30 days.
Result? I have 30 pieces of content made across different platforms (Youtube, Substack, Twitter, TikTok, etc). They’re not the best right now obviously but QUANTITY > QUALITY, QUANTITY > QUALITY, QUANTITY > QUALITY,
DONE > PERFECT, DONE > PERFECT
Example 2: I joined a community called TUK with some young people and now we have a book club and are helping each other build our personal brands
Friend-power will always be greater than willpower so people having your back will give you that extra push and kick you need when obstacles seem pretty tough.
Weekly check-ins with yourself on your progress.
Taken from Sahil Bloom, you can ask yourself these questions at the end of every week. Make sure that your ambition is still truly yours - making sure that you’re still playing the game you want to be playing is essential. So to stoke your hunger and feed your ambition, ask yourself these questions at the end of every week:
What really matters right now in my life? Am I dedicating the necessary energy to it?
Are my current systems and habits aligned with my long-term goals?
What do I need to cut from my life to operate more efficiently?
Asking yourself these questions every week forces you to reflect on where and what you’re spending your time on. The last question’s pretty important too. If you want to be focused, then eliminate what makes you un-focused. Aka. distractions.
Consistency for momentum
The secret of consistency is to show up everyday and of course, improve that 1%. Bad days are a part of the journey, don’t beat yourself up too much over it. That voice in your head saying that you can do everything 100% perfectly if you “really put your mind to it”? That montage you have in your head of you working 12+ hours everyday on that project you’re building? The waking up at 5AM and cold showers every morning, exercise for an hour a day starting TOMORROW montage? Or the “once ____ happens” or “once you move” or once you finally get that microphone or book or change your job, etc.?
Sir. (Or ma’am!) That might be your ego talking. That’s a path to burnout and becoming paralyzed with disappointment when you eventually don’t meet the unrealistic standards you set for yourself. But of course you don’t think they’re unrealistic. Dumbass. Real life and real building and real progress can be seen when you show up everyday regardless of how well your work actually goes: consistency that leads to actual results and output looks more like this:
Maybe eventually you’ll reach that standard of superhuman-level productivity you’re imagining. But you gotta build up to it. When you are down, deal with it wisely, show up again tomorrow and treat yourself kindly. For the love of God, you are enough.
“Overload of information can actually be a problem. Your brain has finite information in a limited space. You get too much advice and it can all cancel to 0. In modern society, we get too much information too quickly and many have attention spans that are very low.”-Naval Ravikant
Hence, I’m only leaving you with these 3 and 1/2 pieces of immediately applicable advice. Surround yourself with better people, curate your digital feed, reflect on your journey weekly, and the classic show up for yourself everyday and through consistency you build momentum (which is like nitro-ultra9000XXX strength fertilizer for building agency).
"Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world."
- Schopenhaur reminding you that you can always do more than you’re currently doing.
Dream bigger and stay there. When mundanity and drudgery take over, optimizing your environment towards fueling your ambition and feeding your hunger is the best way to fight against ambition-killers and suppressants like hopelessness. You can do it! I believe in you. Good luck.
12 | How to stay Ambitious and keep your agency
I loved thiss!!! Super well written. Thanks for the advice, Mia!! Now I have to follow it.