How much ambition do you have?

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I have quite a bit of ambition. It's useful and it feels good, and when ambition leads to achievement it gives me a good amount of life satisfaction.

That having been said, it's important to me to set my own ambitions and not have them shaped by societal expectations. Society says my career ambitions "should" take me into management, but I don't want to go into management. My ambition is to be a better engineer, because that is what is important to me, so that's the direction I take my career.

Ambition is half motivation and half thinking about the world in a goal-oriented way. Patterns of thought can be cultured and made into habit, good or bad, and ambition is no different.

Depends how you measure it. I remember being criticised at work for not having my career path planned out for the rest of my life. They asked me how long I was figuring to work there for, and I said "till I can't stand it any more." On the other hand, the perfectionism I put into recording music can be outrageously ambitious. Every time I record a song I do my utmost to make it sound at least as good as professional recordings of the same genre. It's much the same with any project I happen to take on. Probably not surprising that I shy away from taking on many projects. I simply know that they'll take over my life.

I think it's fine for a person to just want to survive and stay reasonably comfortable. I don't think sustained happiness is a thing you can get by deliberately planning to optimise it. A lot of things only seem like they'll make you happy until you get them, then the novelty wears off and you're back to square one.

Ambition is a funny word. It feels foreign to really think about in my case, even retrospectively. There was not a lot of advanced planning that has ended me up where I am now. Each step of the way I have just taken the best of options that I had at the time.