Ambition

A few of Google's top definitions:

• a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.
• desire and determination to achieve success.
• an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power; desire to achieve a particular end.

These are not precise enough for me. What are these particular ends and where do they come from? How does the relation between hard work and strong desire function? "Success" on its own is a vague criteria to achieve.

As a starting point, "desire" I agree with. In general, ambitious people desire to make change in the world. The strongest desires are so deep-seated as to be involuntary. Like when we're hungry or physically attracted to someone.

"Change in the world" is also very general. Filling up one's gas tank is a change in the state of one's car on a road trip, but this is not a particularly ambitious action unless we're talking about some heroic zombie apocalypse scene.

One might want to see poverty eliminated, but rarely does one truly believe they can create such a change. People don’t complain about gravity and how it should be faster or slower. For ambition to take root, one must first inhabit a mental world that reality might someday match.

If the hypothetical world is impossible, then we call its pursuer delusional rather than ambitious. But a common mistake for unambitious people is to misunderstand what’s really possible. Let’s assume we’re dealing with a tractable delta between the imagined internal and the not-yet external.

A moral endpoint seems to provide the strongest gradient of appeal. If the survival of humankind or our family or some other obvious intrinsic good depends directly on one's actions, then ambitious humans are capable of extraordinary feats including self-sacrifice.

Perhaps I should amend my prior statement on involuntary drives. If one internalizes a keen sense of morality then it becomes more powerful to that individual than the accidental sensations of biology. This is a muscle whose connective tissues can be strengthened by layers of experience, introspection, and reason.

Because morality often entails thinking significantly beyond the present moment, it becomes truly instinctive only through repeated efforts. One must make many principled tradeoffs to beat the lizard brain into submission. Elon has simply done more reps in the gym of morality than others.

Intelligence helps because the greater good must be reasoned about in order to compel the strongest action. One might attempt to outsource the reasoning process to God or other mysterious entities, but in practice one is usually outsourcing it to some object or fallible leader who merely claims to know his morality from God.

As ambitious people know, direct paths are preferable. Our brains are planning engines. To food, jobs, dates. Consciously or subconsciously, we map routes. The better the route mapper, the higher the agency of the person.

High agency can lead one to become more ambitious in that possible paths to a given moral endpoint are more readily apparent. In the other direction, ambition can also increase agency by helping one practice the art of path inspection to determine if their intuition is legitimately valid or delusional.

Hence, by the practice of ambition, thinkers become better doers. And by exercising agency, doers become more ambitious thinkers.

The stronger and further away the moral endpoint, the more tension we experience living in a needlessly broken reality. If only others understood, helped, and changed things... as we now feel we must...

The quality of one's ambition might be measured by how cleanly one processes their feelings of tension. Ideally they are channeled calmly into smooth plans which skirt delusional paths. A refined ambition cleaves tightly to a readily explicable reality.

In the limit, even the highest quality ambition can still create a suicidal tendency. One experiences the binary of heaven and hell: infinite moral goodness in the possible versus infinite moral badness in the present. Then it’s worth doing everything in one’s power—until and including death—if necessary to achieve the goal.

Ambitious people don't take “no” for an answer.