#3: How to Do Great Work? - Ambition

What if I'm not ambitious enough?

Most people think ambition is:

I believe I have the ability to do great work. I can make it happen. 💪

That makes sense. Since you believe you can, you are more likely to undertake the task and think it through, thereby increasing your chances of actually achieving it.

This diagram is from a post I wrote, Career Confidence, to explain why alpha-male ambition is more likely to be high-achieving.

But comparing myself with all those alpha males in Silicon Valley…I just don’t. I really tried but I couldn’t fake it. I’m not a male, I’m not alpha, I’m not as confident. What should I do? Can I still be ambitious?

Ambition Without Confidence

I began to realize that the societal definition of ambition, seemingly benefiting only alpha males, is flawed. It neglects many essential qualities required to excel, such as drive, grit, and determination.

Thus, I have formulated an alternative definition of ambition:

I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m determined to try regardless. 🫠

Even if a task seems nearly impossible and I lack confidence in my ability to achieve it, my passion and determination to give it my best are what truly matter. Why should confidence be the determining factor?

For example, when I dropped out of my old school, my survival was uncertain. However, I knew it was a step I had to take due to my passion for learning. Failure was a possibility, but it didn’t deter me. In my view, ambition = I MUST do it regardless.

My argument is that regardless of your confidence level, if you constantly change goals – a tendency I often observe among my talented confident classmates – the ability to persuade and impress becomes inconsequential. While they might climb rapidly initially, my objective is to go the distance. And the only thing I need is a leap of faith to kick it off.

All in all, inadequate confidence is okay as long as we have other qualities to compensate for it.

Can We Grow Our Ambition?

Another misconception I want to address is the common belief that ambition is innate within us (i.e., we cannot alter our level of ambition). I strongly disagree with this notion, as ambition is the interplay of mindset, skills, and environment, and therefore, it can grow. Let me share with you my journey of building ambition in AI.

In May, I didn’t even have a job and had never done engineering before. How did I gain the confidence and ambition to do great work as an AI engineer?

It was through honing my skills and achieving some external validation (having users + getting a job) that I built my confidence and ambition.

Indeed, I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself an AI engineer when I had only worked on one personal project or during my first week on the job. However, now, after finishing an AI pipeline for my company, it would be a lie that I don’t consider myself an AI engineer.

The Mechanism for Growing Ambition

I say ambition can grow because mindset, skills, and environments are interconnected and can change our beliefs about ourselves.

For instance, living in San Francisco and having so many acquaintances and friends in YC, it’s hard to believe YC is difficult to get into when everyone is there.

SF startup community

Similarly, observing friends of my founder engaging in conflicts with their co-founders and voicing complaints about fundraising has demystified the process of starting a company; it stops feeling so intimidating when you see normal people navigating these challenges.

Having school friends who used to do drugs every day found companies and wrote machine learning pipelines, even though they never really coded, I started to believe that I could do so much more too.

With my skills growing every day and meeting top AI people in the city, I have begun to realize that I'm not bad. Most people’s understanding of AI isn’t that different from mine. Those who are really good have either already raised a substantial amount of money or have become super famous on Twitter. So… maybe I could be even better than I think.

In short, I break down the source of ambition growth into three interactions:

#complexcausality/#multiplecauses

• Mindset <→ Environment: Since others have already realized the ambition for me, my mind has begun to envision a route to achieve it.

• Mindset <→ Skills: This, coupled with the daily growth of my skills, has fostered increasing confidence.

• Skills <→ Environment: The enhancement of my skills is also attributed to being surrounded by top AI engineers.

At its core, the interplay between visualizing external accomplishments, developing internal skills, and the influence of a conducive environment cultivates a mindset oriented towards confidence, carving a path toward realizing my ambitions.

Hence, I believe that even if someone starts with low ambition, their ambition can grow with the development of skills and abundant support from their environment, as ambition starts to become a realistic goal.

Takeaway

The overall takeaways for me are:

(1) If I redefine ambition in a way that suits me well, I can still achieve great work without feeling overly confident.

(2) Ambition isn't fixed. My ambition can grow as my skills develop in a resourceful environment.

Hence, I feel very ambitious to continue on my great work tmr!