The Ambitious Personality

It is OK to be ambitious

We are in the heart of graduation season, and young people across the country are being told to go forth and take on the world. But the topic of personal ambition itself seems to be a little fraught. People are comfortable with “following your dreams,” helping others, and trying to make a difference in the world, but hardcore ambition and drive are often viewed with a little suspicion. It’s different in business schools, where personal ambition is more openly celebrated, although even there people often feel the need to temper or soften overt ambition.

I also talk to a range of young people informally. This is just part of being an old guy and being at that stage of life where you get a lot of joy watching young people succeed. And I notice the same pattern: the young people I think are going to have an impact are ambitious, but they often don’t feel fully supported in that ambition. There’s this really interesting phenomenon in academia where there is a lot of envy for successful people, so personal ambition is often kept private.

So I wanted to talk a little bit about what ambition is and isn’t in the world of personality psychology.

First, it’s good to start with a definition of ambition, and here is one from Timothy Judge and colleagues (Judge & Kammeyer-Mueller, 2012). They define ambition as:

The persistent and generalized striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment

As you can see, ambition is about personal, goal-directed success of some significance.

Interestingly, Judge and colleagues treated ambition as what personality psychologists call a “middle-level trait.” Using participants from the famous seven-decade longitudinal Terman study, they constructed a composite measure of ambition. With this approach, Judge and colleagues found that ambition was predicted in part by conscientiousness, extraversion, lower neuroticism, intelligence, and even parental occupational prestige. Ambition, in turn, predicted educational attainment, occupational prestige, and income across the lifespan. So ambition seems to be grounded in personality to an extent and play a role in financial and occupational success.

Given the seeming importance of ambition in the life course, the next question becomes: how do we measure individual differences in ambition using a self-report measure? There is a recent five-item scale that is face-valid and does a pretty good job. The scale is by Hirschi and Spurk (2021), and the five items are listed below:

“I am ambitious.”
“I strive for success.”
“I have challenging goals.”
“For me it is very important to achieve outstanding results in my life.”
“For me it is very important to accomplish great things.”

Just by reading these five items, you get a flavor of ambition. It’s about individual success and greatness that is brought about by one’s own effort. People don’t say, “I’m really ambitious, I hope somebody gives me a million dollars.” They say, “I’m really ambitious, I’m going to achieve these things and become a millionaire.”

And you also can get a hint of why this trait of ambition is a little bit socially or interpersonally fraught. An individual who has a very high level of personal ambition is not necessarily going to invest heavily in personal and community relationships. They might, if that aligns with their goals, but they might not.

Also, ambitious people do things—they don’t just sit around and dream or complain—so they can be a little scary.

What I like to do to help understand any scale is to describe it in terms of the Big Five personality traits, or OCEAN model. In the case of the ambitious personality, there are some clear links to the Big Five. For example, ambition is going to be associated with facets of conscientiousness, like industriousness, and facets of extraversion involving energy and assertiveness. But it doesn’t seem that ambition is simply a renaming of some part of the Big Five.

A paper by Jones, Sherman, and Hogan (2017) looked into this and found that the Big Five does a reasonable job of capturing ambition as measured by the Hogan assessment, but not a complete job. In particular, ambition appears to be spread around different facets of the Five Factor Model:

. . . several different NEO facets are required to predict Ambition and that much of that prediction is unique to the facets themselves (i.e., not shared among them). Additionally, the facets that best predict Ambition show that ambitious people seem upwardly mobile (achievement-striving), socially ascendant and forceful (assertiveness), and self-disciplined (low impulsivity).

The next question I would ask about a scale like this has to do with its relationship to conceptually related constructs. The fancy term for this is looking at construct validity and the nomological network. In this case, researchers have compared ambition to related traits like achievement striving, competitiveness, and future time perspective. It turns out that all these different concepts are correlated, but they also have some important differences.

Achievement striving is about competence, diligence, mastery, and doing tasks well, whereas ambition is more about attaining meaningful success and accomplishment as part of one’s identity and purpose. Likewise, competitiveness can be a route to ambition or part of the process of actualizing one’s ambitions, but it’s not the same thing. And future time perspective is about thinking about and orienting toward the future, whereas ambition involves striving toward difficult and meaningful forms of attainment. Finally, the link between grandiose narcissism and ambition should be apparent—both strive for greatness—the distinction is that, with grandiose narcissism, the ultimate goal is admiration from others.

My own thoughts on ambition are complex.

Freud once described psychology itself as his tyrant: “I have found my tyrant, and in his service I know no limits. My tyrant is psychology.” Freud was so ambitious that he changed his name from Sigismund (not a cool name) to Sigmund, which sounds much closer to a Wagnerian hero.

I am no Freud, but I understand his ambition to understand the human condition. When I was 20, I back-packed to Vienna and Zurich to pay my respects to Freud and Jung’s legacy. I remember a kind Austrian man led me to Freud’s office on the tram. My personal experience of ambition is less that of a tyrant and more that of a powerful force or energy emanating from the Highlands that I can’t really stop. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-50s that I felt that I had accomplished enough to be welcomed by my forefathers.

So ambition isn’t always fun. And success is fleeting.

Something you learn in academia, but which holds true across many areas of life, is that no matter how much most of us accomplish, we are eventually forgotten. We become a link in the chain or, less poetically, we become sediment at the bottom of the great lake of knowledge.

When I walk my dogs, I occasionally run into one of the world’s great social psychologists, who is long retired, and the young people in the field wouldn’t recognize him. Our days in the sun are very short and numbered.

At the same time, I’ve met a lot of very successful people, and it’s hard to think of anybody who got very far without a good chunk of personal ambition. You can be driven from the outside, perhaps to please your family or win approval, but eventually that kind of motivation burns you out.

So, if you are a very ambitious person, I would consider going for it when you’re young. You have the energy and the runway in front of you. Find people who support your ambition and don’t want to smother it.

And you need to learn some discernment, because that inner drive that propels your ambition can also destroy you.

People will often say that you need to find balance, and I think over time there’s a lot of wisdom in that mind-body-heart triad for becoming a stable person. Jimmy Buffett captured this beautifully in one of the final songs from his last album:

Equal strain on all parts
Whatever course you set
It’ll ease the pain on backs and brains and hearts.

And he was an incredibly ambitious artist who played a beach bum.

So in the long run, you need to find balance. But if you’re ambitious and you want to have a life that you can look back on and think, “I left a wake,” or “I made a mark,” or “I put a dent in the universe,” or whatever metaphor you prefer, you probably need to lean into that ambition.

And it’s probably going to be a lonely and bumpy road at times. But if you can find other ambitious people who support you along the way, it can also be a remarkable journey.

Links to my work: Homepage; Peterson Academy; Books on Amazon

My New Peterson Academy course: The Psychology of Wealth

My PA Intro to Psych history lecture now on YouTube

Some citations

Hirschi, A., & Spurk, D. (2021). Striving for success: Towards a refined understanding and measurement of ambition. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 127, 103577.

Jones, A. B., Sherman, R. A., & Hogan, R. T. (2017). Where is ambition in factor models of personality? Personality and Individual Differences, 106, 268–273.

Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer‐Mueller, J. D. (2012). On the value of aiming high: The causes and consequences of ambition. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(4), 758–775.

Disclaimer:
The information in this post is provided for educational and informational purposes only. Nothing contained herein constitutes medical, psychological, psychiatric, financial, or professional advice of any kind. This content is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition, nor should it be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with qualified medical, mental health, financial, or other licensed professionals. Always seek the advice of an appropriately credentialed professional regarding any specific questions or concerns you may have.