Ambition - doing what YOU want

When I worked in Canary Wharf, we had a tradition that a few of the team would enjoy a steak on the last Friday of the month at the Waitrose Steak Bar. On this particular day, they were already full so John, the chef, suggested that we went and had a couple of glasses of red at the wine bar whilst we were waiting. The boss was at the FCA and there wasn’t much going on in the office, so why not, it was nearly the weekend anyway?

For some reason, every time that we got a call from John to say that 5 stools were available we decided to have ‘just one more’, so we were a few bottles down by the time we did start to make our way across to the other side of the store to tuck into our rib-eyes and chips,

I was somewhere between the seafood counter and the frozen vegetables, almost staggering my way to the steak bar with a large glass of Villa Maria Pinot Noir in my hand, when I saw him. I’ll never forget my boss’s face, back early from his meeting with the regulator and grabbing a few provisions for the weekend. He said nothing, shook his head as he continued on his route and I scuttled off to the steak bar. It wasn’t the best steak I’d ever had.

Things between him and I didn’t ever really recover from that. I was bored in my job, and he knew it. And then, one afternoon, with a smile on his face he told me that he had lined me up for a role in another team. He explained what the job was all about, that it was effectively a promotion, and potentially more money.

I didn’t like the sound of it. The role wasn’t dissimilar to what I was already doing and I wasn’t enjoying that. I’d made the mistake before of chasing a job for the money, for the status and I wasn’t going to do it again.

‘Thanks, but no thanks’ I said. ‘I do appreciate it but I’m going to say no’

His expression made him look even more disappointed than when I’d nearly spilled Burgundy down his silk Hermes tie in Waitrose.

‘That’s disappointing’ he said ‘I thought you were ambitious’

Ambitious.

In the minutes, hours and days after I’d turned down the offer, the word kept nagging away at me. I’d always considered myself ambitious but never really thought about what it meant. Until then. The Cambridge dictionary tells us that ambition is a strong desire and determination to achieve success, power, wealth, or a specific goal. It acts as the driving force that motivates you to put in the effort, time, and focus required to turn your personal or professional visions into reality.

So yes, in the business world, being ambitious is about that desire to progress, to get promoted to climb the corporate ladder. But something inside of me had changed and I was no longer as interested in climbing that ladder. In fact, for some reason, maybe a year or so of boredom and the realisation that I was getting older and that time was finite, I started to think that maybe the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

My boss really had done me a favour as I came to understand that ambition for me was achieving what I wanted to do, not what he wanted me to do, or what the organisation expected me to do. No longer was it just about power or wealth, status or a job title -yeah, they still mattered, but I’d realised that doing something that I was more interested in and in turn would enjoy, was more important than I’d previously thought about.

Perhaps most importantly, I also realised that I needed to find a better work/life balance, a balance in which work didn’t dominate my life in quite the same way. Whether I ever really achieved that is another story, but, as I entered my working mid-life crisis, I was learning a valuable lesson about what was truly important to me . . .