The Double-Edged Sword of Ambition: Why an Unrealistic “Ideal Self” Will Harm You
Society and the media often encourage us to pursue juvenile delusions of grandeur instead of healthy life aspirations. However, these overly ambitious “ideal selves” can result in disillusionment, low self-esteem, obsessive behavior, and regret for not being able to achieve our fantasies. It's time to rethink ambition.
I have a bone to pick with current society’s idea of ambition. We’re relentlessly encouraged to “dream big,” “set a high bar,” or “go far.” We tell it to our kids, teachers tell it to students, ads say or insinuate it, and motivational speakers — and social media influencers — yell it from the rooftops.
But is this actually good advice?
I’m not opposed to setting goals, particularly if they are inspiring and have a positive impact on others. I fully support the idea of “improving oneself” or providing our children with better opportunities than we had.
However, it's crucial to distinguish between healthy ambition and the unrealistic, pressure-driven version that society often promotes.
Few things are, indeed, as human as dreaming. As long as people exist, they’ll come up with new things to do, new ideas to bring to life, and new horizons to cross. And we all somewhat dream in compensatory ways: we aspire to fulfill unmet needs, rectify past injustices, or achieve a sense of mastery and autonomy that was perhaps lacking in our early years.
But like a sharp-edged sword, idealization can easily cut the person who wields it
A recent paper published in the journal Emotion, “The Ideal Road Not Taken: The Self-Discrepancies Involved in People’s Most Enduring Regrets,” identifies two primary sources of regret in people’s lives:
- Inaction: People tend to regret their inactions more than their actions, regardless of their actions’ success. We’re harder on ourselves for not having at least tried to do things than for attempting them and missing.
- Failing to live up to an ideal self: People regret their failure to live up to their ideal selves — internal images of who they were supposed to become. For instance, not being a good parent or professional, not living out an alternative professional interest, or not achieving an “x” level of success in a given field, whether it involves money, career, or peers’ admiration.
I have no problem with the first type of regret—inaction. As an entrepreneur, I earnestly believe a good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. I’ve seen too many people become paralyzed when they’ve seriously considered chasing their dreams because they fear “not knowing” rather than for them to believe in their ability to learn and adapt on the go.
(In my experience, this self-censure or paralysis happens much more to women than to men — men being culturally trained since childhood to be assertive go-getters, which, of course, can be positive in some situations and disastrous in others.)
However, regarding the second type of regret — the “failing to live up to an ideal self” — I have a long list of critical remarks.
Unrealistic ideal selves cause heartbreak and pain
It’s true that we tend to haunt ourselves with our failings—the paper’s authors are on the money. It’s just that our “failings” are solely based on the benchmarks that we arbitrarily set for ourselves. The suffering and regret they produce are unnecessary. Here is where I see a lot of dysfunction and an urgent need for many people to get therapy or do serious self-work and rid themselves of fantastical expectations before it’s too late.
Where do our ideal selves come from?
The invention of an ideal self usually happens in childhood, when we commit to following in daddy’s or mommy’s footsteps, or subconsciously decide to acquire what they lacked, or perhaps set out on a path that is opposite of what we witnessed in our caretakers — choosing not to drink, gamble, or experience poverty if that’s what we lived through at home. Or we simply embrace a socially or media-given image of success, most often a materialistic (or, in the case of women, a body-centered) one.
To boot, many children are taught that they can become anything they wish to be, which is almost invariably unrealistic.
Later on in life, the grandiosity of many of these fantasies leads to disillusionment, low self-esteem, and obsessive behavior — and exactly the second type of regret the aforementioned paper describes.
Our ideal selves are entirely fabricated
Our aspirational selves — who we think we should and can become — are imaginary constructs. They’re arbitrary benchmarks that we drag with us through life like heavy chains.
The only alternative is to make an effort to review our dreams, bring them down to earth, trim what’s plain childish, and connect them with what our adult selves know — or should know! — is better for us.
Many factors intervene early on in our conception of an ideal self:
- How in touch we were with reality — which kids usually aren’t, and it’s during childhood, again, that the largest part of our ideal selves is drawn up.
- Our talents and our self-appraisement of them, including how much we expect to be able to develop them. Despite our best intentions, being excellent at drawing as a kid does not mean that we’ll necessarily be able to build up that ability into becoming a world-class artist, architect, or designer.
- The amount of rewards we imagined we’d reap. Nobody’s usually interested in an ideal self that will reap smelly, rotten tomatoes from others!
- The assumption that working towards our ideal self would be a source of lifelong happiness. Which assumes our personalities are fixed. Which they’re clearly not!
The resulting idealized persona we set for ourselves is consequently no more grounded than our favorite cartoon superhero.
So please, drop the need for admiration — and instead become an involved neighbor and family member who loves others courageously. Drop the need to impress your parents — or even gain their acceptance if they’re unwilling to give it (a painful renunciation, I know) — and instead commit to doing personally meaningful work in the world.
It’s not wrong to have an ideal self and demand a lot from ourselves. It’s that we tend to be grandiose, fantastical, and sometimes plain self-destructive about it.
Also, badly informed, as we’ll see.
Our ideal selves don’t do us any favors
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in Missing Out (2012) that “our doubts [in life] tend to be about whether we can get the satisfactions that we seek, not about the nature of these satisfactions.”
That is, we don’t often stop to wonder if we’re being stupid about our aspirations.
Furthermore, we have the ingrained belief that strife—“stretching ourselves” day in and day out — makes us happy. It doesn’t. Paul Dolan, from the London School of Economics, is one of the foremost experts on happiness. In Happy Ever After (2019), he writes:
There is next to nothing in the happiness data to suggest that addiction to this meta-narrative [that of incessant striving, which he calls “reaching”] is good for us or those around us.
In The Geometry of Wealth (2018), author and wealth advisor Brian Portnoy warns:
Nearly all of us buy into ‘the myths of happiness’ — beliefs that certain adult achievements (marriage, kids, jobs, wealth) will make us forever happy and that certain adult failures or adversities (health problems, not having a life partner, having little money) will make us forever unhappy. The evidence suggests otherwise.
We care more about form than substance
Moreover, our obsession with ambition and success is biased toward the appearance of success — often not even the real thing. It’s about “looking the part.” We’re image-obsessed nowadays, so it only makes sense that it’s the “look of success” — as seen by our family and friends, work colleagues, and social media followers — that we’re actually after.
In the famous Greek myth, Narcissus falls in love not with himself but with the image of himself — just like we do now. We learn to love the image of our successful selves, not ourselves as we truly are in life (warts and all).
In fact, we lose sight of the fact that who we are is not tied to our results, possessions, or, frankly, anything external. I’ve written about this before.
Because we forget this and instead believe that, as we struggle in the world, our intrinsic value is at risk, our striving produces the unwelcome twin brother of ambition: fear. This is why saying that we desire to obtain something means that we’re afraid of not getting it.
And living with fear — trust me, I have enough personal experience with this to pass around — is no way of living.
Your values affect other people
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who was concerned with finding a universal ethics — valid everywhere, for everyone, for all time — coined the term “Categorical Imperative.” It means acting in a way that, if it were universally imitated, would lead to wonderful outcomes and not world-wrecking ones.
It’s a tool for analyzing whether one’s behavior is ethical. You ask yourself, “If everyone behaved like I do, would the world be in better shape?” Your answer usually settles the matter.
So, ask yourself, Kant-style: If everyone went for fame and fortune — for an opulent ideal self — wouldn’t “humbler” lives be shadowed and seen as less worthy? What would happen to the very honorable life of a woman who finds joy and meaning in her family and building a small business? Would her life become, by comparison, a failure?
Perhaps you had the good fortune of having a mother, father, or close family member who led a discrete and self-respecting life. No fame, no riches, just doing the right thing — providing for the family and being lovingly present — every day. You know how worthy and often rare that is. However, when you set up a grandiose ideal for yourself, you’re probably belittling — if at least to yourself — the value of such lives.
Truly, if we all went after grandiose ideal selves, many precious things in the world would go undone.
And because most of us would fall short of such expectations anyway, we’d have hell to pay later, regret-wise.
Even if you do reach your ideal self, the pursuit will be costly
The founder of IBM, Thomas Watson, famously said: “The fastest way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”
It’s often touted as an inspirational quote, but have you seen what really happens when you increase the amount of failure you experience?
It changes you. In this sense, ambition is usually self-correcting, which is a philosophical way of saying that pursuing big goals and big results will bring a terrible amount of heartbreak, frustration, and sacrifice along the way. This will, in turn, alter how you feel about your goals, “success,” and your scar-ridden self.
It will also probably soften how you judge people who have not been as successful or fortunate, making the whole enterprise of attaining your ideal self — especially if it included feeling superior to others — rather meaningless. Or at least less important.
There’s a better way
Aim for whatever works for you — and that helps others, ideally. But don’t tie your self-worth to your results or the size of your aspirations. And don’t come up with — much less cling to — an ideal “photograph” of what success in your life should look like. Otherwise, you’ll be laying the groundwork for the “I-failed-at-my-ideal-life” type of regret.
If you feel that you simply must attain, seize, or “be” something in life (and I insist: what you actually are can’t even be touched by outside circumstances), then please first analyze your aspirations to make sure they reflect your genuine interests and talents and aren’t just childish, compensatory fantasies.
M.F. Stone, in his pithy book Goals Suck (2014), expresses the same idea:
You might be much better off if you stop glorifying the things you want in life because of how special you would be if you achieved them. And to do that, you really can’t keep putting whatever it is you’re yearning for on a pedestal. A better route to take might be to work on neutralizing how you feel about it.
Work on yourself so that you don’t feel you need the flashy car, bank balance, home, or job title. Then, attend to whatever calls to you.
I’m not asking for saintliness (though I honestly think that’s available to all of us.) I’m aware that something about being human makes it difficult to feel that we have done, or are, enough. We are unwilling to extinguish the hope that, one day, we will be recognized as special — a recognition that will make us somehow “complete” and “enough.”
But we’re all ultimately human, and nobody is that much different or better than everyone else. We’re all on the same planetary journey across the vastness of space.
To conclude, Dutch cultural critic Marian Donner reflects on the beauty of our inevitable imperfections:
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Normally, this poem by Samuel Beckett is interpreted as encouraging you to try something as many times as it takes until you get it, but I interpret it differently. We will never succeed. The beauty is in failure. In the imperfection of every attempt and every result. This is what makes human beings human: failure. Dance, stumble, fall, and dedicate an ode to it. If possible, with style. (In Praise of Wilder Lives: An Anti-Self-Help Manifesto, 2020)