Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Today's guest essay comes from Fortune's success desk writer Alicia Adamczyk, who will share a bit about how the pandemic killed her ambition and how she's getting it back on her own terms. Plus, Nikki Haley will be Trump's first opponent for 2024 and Beyoncé's fans will put Ticketmaster to the test. Happy Thursday!
Reclaiming ambition. Over the past three years, many Americans have fallen out of love with ambition. Or, at least, they’ve fallen out of love with one definition of it: striving to achieve corporate success for success’s sake.
Faced with a crisis like COVID-19, many of us—women and people of color, in particular—started rethinking our relationships to work and finding fulfillment outside of the nine-to-five.
I wasn’t immune to these feelings. About a year into the pandemic, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied and restless; it was hard not to question what I was doing with my life and what I valued and why.
This led to a time I’ve come to think of as a creative and spiritual hibernation of sorts. I was still working hard, but I didn’t have any specific goals in mind, personal or professional. I logged off at 5 p.m. and my brain shut down for the day. I wasn’t reading as much, I wasn’t discovering new music and art; I was, for the first time in my life, “simply vibing,” as I wrote for Fortune.
Lately, though, I find myself dissatisfied and restless in a different way. I want to strive for something. I want to work toward a goal. I want my ambition back.
I certainly don’t want things to go back to “normal,” whatever that was (I don’t think that’s possible post-pandemic). But I am trying to figure out how to reframe ambition and all that it encompasses—creativity, productivity, discipline—for myself. And to embrace the rhythms of my ambition, rather than feel embarrassed or stressed when I’m not inspired or actively ticking off the boxes society foists on me.
“Our entire economy would be well served to acknowledge that there are creativity ebbs and flows, and the market ebbs and flows,” says Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist in Portland, Ore., and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. “The reality of being a human being is life is always going to have ups and downs, and we are healthiest when we can stay attuned to those ups and downs.”
This is a privileged conversation to be having, for sure. But I’ve been heartened by the dialogue it’s already opened up with friends, acquaintances, and readers in recent days. It seems a lot of us are rethinking our relationship with work, goals, and self-fulfillment. As one friend told me, “I want to be ambitious again, but I do not want it to be all-consuming.”
I’m writing a few more stories on ambition in the coming weeks. If you’d like to talk about what it means to you, I’d love to hear from you. And read the full piece here.
Alicia Adamczyk
alicia.adamczyk@fortune.com
@AliciaAdamczyk
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