A topic that has come up (in somewhat different forms) independently in several different areas of my life recently is that of trying to balance the idea of simple and frugal living with a lot of ambitions in life.

Let’s say, for example, that you have enormous career ambitions. You want to be CEO of a company, or maybe you want to design the next product that literally everyone’s using. You have huge career goals and dream of all of the trappings that will come with it.

Maybe you have other big goals, like running for Congress. Maybe you’re part of a homeschooling collective and also want to run a side business. Maybe you want to be a great writer whose work is read by tens of thousands.

Perhaps you simply dream of living a life that has a perfect balance of family, marriage, parenting, social time, interesting career, hobbies, and community projects.

All of those things are ambitious. All of those things are a serious draw on a person’s focus. All of those things add difficult wrinkles to a person’s everyday life.

How do those things square up with frugality or the idea of “simple living”? How can a person on a fast career track or with a bunch of sprawling ambitions lead a simple and frugal life? Let’s get more details in this article.

• How can I be More Ambitious in Life?
• What are Examples of Ambitions?
• What is an Ambitious Person?
• How do I Choose my Ambition?
• How do you Succeed?

How can I be More Ambitious in Life?

Often referred to as the fire in your gut, ambition is a priceless, timeless and highly valuable characteristic. It is something that you can create within yourself. It is the raw desire to achieve or succeed in a goal. Ambition can be used as the fuel for motivation.

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It can be combined with a determination to achieve success in literally anything you want. People who are successful in life are described as ambitious. They attract attention and get the best out of life at every turn. You may feel that your life lacks the excitement of achievement.

Do you want to join their elite club and be a mover and shaker today? Here is how to be more ambitious in life and achieve more.

Do not be scared to take risks

One of the things to do so as to become more ambitious is to take risks. You have to be comfortable in risk. Sometimes, you may have to take a leap of faith or bet everything on one decision. In most cases, you will find that the situation you are most afraid of will actually not happen. To become more ambitious in life, you need to give yourself the opportunity to explore and experiment with many options at a time.

You could have a big opportunity waiting for you right around the corner if you simply try out for it. According to psychiatrist Neel Burton, ambition makes you willing to experience fear or anxiety and tolerate it. All that you need to develop ambition is a consistent drive.

Therefore, find out the risks in your life which you can take to achieve more. After that, find out the fear which is holding you back. Once you do this, create a drive within you and face it head-on. This will make you ambitious.

Exercise your imagination

Often encouraged in children, imagination is a beautiful thing. It can help you to escape the mundane nature of day to day life. It can also be a useful tool in overcoming negative thoughts. Ambition is a state of being. Whenever you are facing challenges, this state can dwindle. In such times, imagination is your best friend. Imagine the pain away.

Military personnel and extreme sports-people understand and confess the power of mind over matter. When you feel down and tired, repeat something encouraging to yourself and imagine better times. Experiment by saying and thinking only positive things for 3 days only. You will experience a transformation and develop boundless ambition.

Be willing to invest time into your goal

Time is the most important resource. When invested wisely, it has the best returns. The more time you invest in a project, the faster it grows and becomes better. To become more ambitious, identify a project and work for long hours so as to complete it. People who achieve a lot in life are always willing to do this.

They have so many things that they want to accomplish. Hence, they sleep late and wake early. Do the same and experience the fatigue of working hard for your goal. You will not have to do it forever but you will have to to do it in the first stages of your success story.

Expose yourself to new methods of thought

One of the main killers of ambition is group thinking. This is where you accept popular opinion as your own. Group thinking collects the fears and anxieties of the masses and instills them in members. Therefore, you should break away from this method of thinking so as to become more ambitious.

Seek to be your own unique person and not blend in with the crowd. This helps you to observe life from a free, unbiased perspective. In this way, you can see opportunities that other people will easily miss. By pursuing them with literally no competition, you will achieve more and eventually become ambitious.

Eliminate negative thoughts and promote positive ones

Thoughts are things. The topics which we think about affect us more than we know. Thoughts affect how we feel and consequently how we work. We all have a constant train of thoughts in our minds. Some are positive and others are negative. Negative thoughts create emotional barriers such as doubt and fear. However, positive ones help us to move forward. They motivate us to experiment with something new, step out of our comfort zones and get excited about life.

Focus on attaining knowledge, not success and recognition

In every opportunity, you can seek to achieve knowledge or profit. You may achieve profit or lose it. However, you always learn something new from every experience. Focus on gaining knowledge.

The process of learning, experimenting, exploring and improving can give you constant motivation. It makes the journey worth it and keeps you interested. Therefore, maintain focus on learning from your experiences more than profiting from them. This will keep you motivated to achieve more in life.

Do not wait for the perfect moment, take the moment and make it perfect

In life, you have two main options. You can either waste time and effort trying to make perfect plans or you can get ready and begin right now. Many people spend so much time in life waiting for a perfect moment and never achieve it. This is because it does not exist. Every moment is essentially what you make of it.

As a matter of fact, a perfect start and an average one are the same if you achieve what you ultimately desire. To become an ambitious person, grab the moment and make it perfect. Focus all your energy and resources into it. Do not waste your time waiting for the myth of perfection. This will help you to achieve more in life.

Stay committed

Commitment is the willingness to do an activity when you had rather not. It is the stubborn willingness to stick to a particular beneficial activity no matter what. Commitment is painful when conditions are challenging. However, it is an essential activity to perform so as to become ambitious.

It requires that you sacrifice the pleasures of life. It makes you ask yourself what you are willing to give up so as to achieve what you desire. Develop a strict schedule to help you stay committed and you will achieve more in life. This will make you more motivated to continue.

Stop babying yourself

Ambition and action are bedfellows. You need to have them together so as to achieve any kind of progress. In some cases, you find that your actions are not bringing about the results you desire. Therefore, you decide to cut back and relax saying that you may be pushing yourself too hard.

Under the guise of waiting for a perfect moment, you start to become lazy. This can lead to stagnation and depression too. Therefore, stop being so relaxed about your goals. Do not baby yourself. Push into the unknown and do what needs to be done to get where you want even if you are afraid to do it. This will help you to achieve more.

What are Examples of Ambitions?

Ambition is a strong desire to achieve something, reach a personal goal, or to do something. Ambition is one of the few characteristics that humans possess, unlike the rest of the animal kingdom; or so we believe. A person with ambition has an internal drive that motivates them to try to succeed. People with this trait tend to have a stronger belief in themselves than the rest of the population.

Material ambition

Most people would like to have more money. We believe that money makes life easier. If we are well off, it is easier to pay our bills, purchase things we need and want, and go on vacation to nice places.

Some people believe that those without financial worries or problems find it easier to be happy. They have more freedom, less stress, and more personal time than their less well-off counterparts.

However, if you asked 1,000 people what their number one ambition in life was, few if any would simply say “To be rich.”

Career ambition

Somebody who is studying medicine might say that their ambition is to be a good or perhaps the best surgeon, endocrinologist, researcher, etc. An individual who wants to reach the top of their career ladder has a lot of ambition. They exist in all fields, such as the police force, military, business, science, politics, acting, music, and show business.

Sports ambition

A professional athlete may dream one day of winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Professional soccer players (British: footballers) probably see the pinnacle of their career when they are selected for their national squad or a top club like Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Manchester United, or Juventus.

Although ambitious people may have different goals, they all have something in common. They tend to thrive where there is fierce competition.

What is an Ambitious Person?

An ambitious person is someone always striving to reach a goal. Through hard work, dedication and perseverance — an ambitious person doesn’t give up. She pushes forward and is determined to succeed. While ambition and success aren’t synonymous, ambitious people are always striving to be more and more successful, which often pushes them to work harder and be better—which in many cases leads them to become more successful overall.

Is ambition good or bad?

There are, of course, downsides to many traits that are generally considered positive. Overall, ambition can help someone succeed. It helps give us goals to reach and the passion to want to achieve them. It keeps us motivated and focused. It keeps us engaged with our goals, hopes, and dreams.

However, there are some cases in which being overly ambitious can have detrimental consequences. When people pursue their ambitions at a cost to others (read: Caesar), it can often harm not just those people, but the ambitious person herself, since people will come to regard her as greedy and self-involved.

Caesar may have been overly ambitious, but you probably don’t have to worry about meeting the same fate.

Can ambition be taught?

If someone doesn’t want to be ambitious, she won’t be. But that doesn’t mean that she will never change. We all have those moments — moments when we lack ambition, drive, and passion for things. We all need a little motivation, a little push from time to time. Some people just need a bit more of a push. Sometimes all it takes to help give someone a little boost of ambition is to be more outwardly ambitious yourself.

And if you’re the one struggling with ambition, don’t give up! Just keep pushing forward. That’s the best first step.

In reality, becoming more ambitious is a process that entails very small, very achievable steps. All it takes is focus, dedication, patience, and hard work. And once you master these six habits, you’ll be that ambitious person other people envy.

How do I Choose my Ambition?

So how can you harness your ambition to achieve the big goals in your life?

1. Stop worrying about what other people think

Myleene Klass has a postcard pinned to the mirror which was sent to her by a friend. It reads: Why the hell not? Myleene, who rose to fame after becoming a member of the pop group Hear’Say, says:

I see it whenever I am brushing my hair in the morning. Why the hell not give something a go? Because if you don’t then someone else will. I look back at my career and I could never have imagined what I have achieved already. So now I think, why the hell not?

Myleene says it is important not to be intimidated or deterred by people who say you can’t do something. She says: “At school, my maths teacher told me, when you leave these school gates, we are never going to hear from you again. At music college, they told us there was more chance of someone winning the lottery than there was of making it as a pop star.

They were not great odds, but I wasn’t going to just sit down and give up. That is just not innately in me, I couldn’t do it. The drive is to keep on fulfilling and think wow, I achieved that.”

2. Commit wholeheartedly to achieving your goal

Commit is a powerful word. With good reason. If you are half‐hearted about achieving your ultimate goal, you are unlikely to achieve it, simply because you will give up at the first hurdle. If you are serious about being successful, you need to make a commitment to yourself to see your goal through to its conclusion.

3. Believe that this can work

If you don’t fundamentally believe that you will be successful, it will be really hard to persuade anyone else that you will be. This is not about jumping up and down shouting “I’m the greatest”. But it is about consciously starting each day with a real sense of hope, positivity and optimism. It is about backing yourself to win. It is about giving yourself a chance.

If you don’t feel confident, there is no need to tell everyone, or for it to hold you back. Believing you can do something certainly helps, but if you really find it too hard to do, let the facts do the talking.

You may not really believe you can become a bestselling fiction author. But if you write 500 words a day, then after 160 days you will have 80,000 words, more than enough for a book.

4. Stop comparing yourself to other people

So she did it faster and he did it at a younger age. So what? You don’t live their lives, you live yours. If you endlessly compare your achievements to those of other people you will feel terrible, and you will come unstuck.

That’s because there is ALWAYS someone who is going to be better at something than you. The great thing is, unless you are competing in the 400 metres race at the Olympic Games, then it doesn’t actually matter.

Myleene Klass has got this right. She says: “I have never ever compared myself to what everybody else is doing. I am inspired by other people’s fire, but have set my own crazy limit and I want to see what is the most that I can do, what is the furthest that I can push myself. I don’t look at what anyone else is doing, and I think that is actually the secret to it. Because then I would be a second rate version of them, just doing a lesser version of what they are doing and not really achieving it. They would already have done something and I would just be trying to catch up.”

5. Take it one day at a time

No matter how enthusiastic you are, it can be hard to focus on a goal that is many months, or years, away. So focus on the next 24 hours instead. It is short enough to manage and yet long enough to do something significant. Think about how you can use today in the most productive way possible to get closer to what you want to achieve.

How do you Succeed?

To some, when they think of success, they imagine wealth; others want power; some just want to make a positive impact on the world.

All of these are perfectly valid, indeed success is a concept that means different things to different people. Though no matter what success is to you, it almost certainly isn’t something will come easily.

There are countless guides and books to being successful, however, as success is personal and unique to each individual. The advice contained in these books can often not be relevant. Therefore following the advice of a single individual can often be unhelpful.

With this in mind, considering the advice of a great many people, people whose ideas of success were different both to each other, and quite possibly, to you can be a good alternative.

What follows is a list of 10 of the best pieces of advice from some of the most successful people who have ever lived. If you want to learn how to be successful, these tips are essential:

1. Think Big

From Michelangelo Buonarroti, Great Renaissance Artist:

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

There are few artists as influential as Michaelangelo. Today centuries after his death, his work still inspires and connects to people. His work is world famous, just think of his statue of David, or the Mural in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican.

Imagine then, if he decided not to work as an artist.

Being a successful artist has always been extremely difficult, imagine if he decided to give up this ambition in favour of something easier?

Oftentimes, people often decided to put their dreams aside for something more “realistic”. To give up their dream for something easier. This quote teaches us the danger of such a point of view.
Instead be ambitious.

2. Find What You Love to Do and Do It

From Oprah Winfrey, Media Mogul:

“You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job and not be paid for it.”

This is a good quote to remember and think about when you’re at work.

Imagine being as successful as possible in your current job. Ultimately you’ll probably find yourself working extremely hard and this it will take up much of your time.

If it’s a job you hate, then being successful at it might only mean filling your life with something you hate to do. What’s the sense in this?

Instead, why not focus on doing something you love? When you’ve found what you’re passionate about, you get the motivation to keep you moving. Success at this means the fulfilment of your dreams.

Not sure what your passion is yet? You should learn about this Motivation Engine first.

Even if you’re not successful, you still filled your time with something you love to do. Many successful musicians spent years of their lives doing unpaid performances, the only reason they kept playing was because they loved to perform.

3. Learn How to Balance Life

From Phil Knight, CEO of Nike Inc.:

“There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”

All too often, people think that to be successful, they need to make the object of their success their life.

If a person thinks their job will lead them to success, then they may spend countless hours per day, and well into the evening working hard.

However this comes at the cost of rest, your health and having an enjoyable life. Ultimately they may burn out and cease to be successful at their job anyway.

If success comes from having a strong social life and a good group of friends, their job may suffer; meaning that they may lose their job, and then be unable to afford going out with friends.

In these ways, success, as Phil Knight says above, is helped by balance. Think of it as a balance between rest and work, or work and play.

4. Do Not Be Afraid of Failure

From Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motors:

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”

There is a story, it’s unconfirmed whether it actually happened, yet the message within is none the less true:

Thomas Edison inventing the lightbulb was the result of several hundred failed attempts. In an interview, he was asked “How do you feel after all of your failed attempts?”

His response was great, “I didn’t fail, I learned hundreds of ways not to invent the lightbulb”

He saw each “failure” as a lesson. From that lesson he learned what won’t work, and also might work instead.

Each failed attempt, each rejection, were key steps on his path to success. It is easy to feel like you should give up after a failure. But perhaps in that failure is a lesson.

Pay attention to your failures, study them. Perhaps then you’ll learn how to succeed.

5. Have an Unwavering Resolution to Succeed

From Colonel Sanders, Founder of KFC:

“I made a resolve then that I was going to amount to something if I could. And no hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me. And I have done that ever since, and I win by it. I know.”

This, in many ways relates to the above quote about learning from your failures.

It’s the easiest thing in the world to give up from a failure. The only way to push on is if you have the true burning desire to succeed, to not be moved or dissuaded from your goals.

If you are not truly dedicated towards success, then each failure will hurt more, each set back will slow you down.

Success is hard; without the unwavering desire to succeed, this difficulty may seem insurmountable. With the desire, it is merely an obstacle to go through.

6. Be a Person of Action

From Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance Genius:

“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”

Though it was said hundreds of years ago, it works just as much today as it ever had. It applies to literally any successful person.

Think about it, picture someone like William Shakespeare:

When we think of the time he lived in, we think of the time in a way shaped by him. When we think of Renaissance era Italy, we think of Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Or think about the present day, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Our current way of life would simply be incomparably different if they didn’t accomplish what they did.

You’re probably reading this article on a device by a company that they either founded or companies influenced by them.

All these figures were proactive, they saw ways to do things differently and did them. If they let the world shape them, then they’d simply fit into the background. Instead they shaped the world.

Applying this to you?

Don’t be afraid of going outside the norm. If you can think of a better way to do something, do it that way. If you fail, try again.

7. Cultivate Positive Relationships

From Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of America: “

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”

The best leaders and some of the most influential people (and Theodore Roosevelt is one of the best leaders and one of the most influential people to have lived) were not those who caused commotions, who fought with people or disregarded people; but were people who were friendly to those around them.

People liked them. They wanted them to do well.

This is key to good leadership.

It’s logical. If someone likes you, they want to help you; if you give them a suggestion, they’ll gladly follow through with it.

But if someone doesn’t like you, they may either refuse to help or actively get in your way.

What’s more, it’s always a good idea to cultivate good relationships. You can never tell who will prove to become someone who’ll be able to help you in a big way, or even be a good and supportive friend.

As such, help people and they may help you; and be good to people, and they my be good to you.

8. Don’t Be Afraid of Introducing New Ideas

From Mark Twain, Famed Author:

“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

It is an unfortunate truth that those with the boldest ideas are often disregarded.

Most of us are taught from an early age to think and do things similarly to everyone else. This can be great to fill an existing role. But to truly do things differently (and all successful people did things differently), you need to think differently.

If you have a new idea, don’t throw it away because it’s new and different; instead, celebrate it. Your strange new idea might one day be the one that leads you to success.

9. Believe in Your Capacity to Succeed

From Walter Disney, Founder of Walt Disney Company:

“If you can dream it, you can do it.”

Success has to be something you can imagine yourself achieving.

It is possible that you will come across those who doubt you and your ability to succeed. You must not become one of these people because the moment you cease believing and dreaming is the moment these dreams fall away.

Keep dreaming!

10. Always Maintain a Positive Mental Attitude

From Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of America:

“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”

Like the above quote says, you need to trust in your ability to succeed. This is the only way to cultivate the right mindset.

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Replace negative thoughts with positive ones. You need to approach problems, not as obstacles stopping you, but merely tasks that need to be completed for you to keep going.

If you stay positive and think like this, setbacks won’t affect you so much, people’s doubts won’t impact you and even the biggest obstacles will seem like minor problems.

However with the wrong mindset of doubt, you’ll be much easier to stop.

Bottom Line

Ambitious people seem not to have any limits. They do not let fear hold them back. By identifying goals, creating schedules to achieve them and staying committed, they achieve more in life. The guidelines above can help you to do exactly the same. Learn and apply them in your life. They can bring about the positive change that you desire.