Having "ambition" in life

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It seems plenty of people have main ambitions or goals in life that they are after. Whether it be a career path or they want to have a house with a family with 2 kids by the time they are a certain age. I admit never relating to having any ambitions in life. I know that makes me sound lazy, but I'm not. I feel the best way to explain it is like life is an ocean and those with ambitions are like "Im going to build a yacht," or "Im going to surf and be the best" meanwhile i feel like im always just dog paddling my way through trying to keep my head above water and not lose it. I dont know if that is a good analogy but it just came into my head. I never feel like I've had the chance for ambitions or big goals cause I am just trying to make it through things in life that i see other people just cruise right on through. I figure if i make it through without ending up homeless or losing my marbles by having epic burnout and somehow manage to keep working then i will have succeed somehow. I guess i just hope the autism doesnt end up destroying me at some point. I guess that is a goal lol.

I don't call it ambition but it was more of a desire to do the best with the cards I was dealt especially wrt career. A basic competition within myself with the goal to live life as best as possible. The 2 kid perfect family is a fallacy and a pipe dream. I felt both relief and regret when I realized it was past time for me to sire offspring.

Same. I've never had any real ambition either, I've been just trying to get by/survive the best I can. I joke sometimes that I'm running around trying to not open cupboard doors into my face, but that's pretty much how I live my life.

I had a friend who had observed of his medical school class that everyone their really really wanted to be doctors.

He had observed those who wanted to make money, those who wanted to please their parents, and those who were arrogant. Regardless of the motive, they were all ambitious.

Consider the person driven since childhood by a particular ambition like wanting to be a lawyer only to find that after seven years of college and law school and ten years as an associate that even making partner in a big law firm it turned out to be unsatisfactory.

There is a lot to be said for the ambition to enjoy each day.

I relate to your post.

When I was a kid, I wanted to have my own Disney-style entertainment company, with a movie studio and theme parks. Then, as I got older, I wanted to at least work in the animation industry. But how could I expect to get my dream job when just getting a so-called "entry level" job took me months or in some cases, years of applying? And today, I'm so stressed out by my current "easy" low-paying job, I don't know if I'd even want to work in the high-pressure animation industry. At this point, I would just like to have a non-stressful job I don't have to be constantly afraid of losing and enough free time to do my own artwork. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there even is any such thing as a non-stressful job.

Well ambition seems to mean different things to different people .. Most of my life getting through each day was
My greatest ambition . Never thought to go find bigger things , but in doing what I did . I kinda grew , And did what I thought might make my day easier , whether at home or being away from home. Then managed to save alittle money , between getting a part time job . And Learning to shop for things in the classified ads . And living out of second hand stores .And then found stuff , I could work with . Cause of little skills I learned as a child . Then discovered that certain small business owners . Could make use of the things , I worked with . Then since I would be going into these quickly marts anyhow for snacks or some quick food . I got brave and asked the owner if they wanted my skills . So little by little found more small businesses , quickly marts , that wanted my level of skill service
But many stores turned me down, but I was still having to use these places to get things , so I kept asking .
And so made myself part time work . Which helped me financially . It was more a accidental case of ambition.
Clumsiness and all , but was doing my own thing . But had to learn to smile at small business owners when I met with them. And had to remember each one of them were my boss, when I was there. But I was out doing things at my own pace and stuff I was good at .

I was never ambitious, either.

However, I wanted to do my job well and make good choices in life.

Occasionally I wanted to achieve specific goals but not as if they were prizes, rather as things that would provide better choices.

If you'd asked me when I was younger I would've said I had lots of ambition. I had a solid academic performance, but went far beyond my capacities (at the time) by starting my career in Tokyo, in a culture I knew hardly anything about, occasionally working 100h a week, while simultaneously preparing for marriage and having children (and trying to learn a foreign language from scratch).

I had a spectacular meltdown which set me back a lot, but my real loss of motivation happened when I realized that it is not worth sacrificing mental health and happiness to reach the goal of high-ambition paths. So I stopped putting in the work and focused on living contently.

That was five years ago, and looking back I think I just wasted a lot of time doing not much at all. Consequently I'm thinking of starting to work harder again. Not because of ambition, just for my own pleasure. Focusing on measuring one's sense of worth and determining one's self-image according to an inner, personal reference scale is a more healthy and happier way to live.

When I was a kid, I had ambition in the sense that I liked to speculate. To the point where I had floorplans of my dream house. I would often change my mind regarding what job I wanted to do when I grew up. Personally I find it funny when I think about where I thought I'd be in life at this stage when I was eight. Frankly she'd be horrified if she saw me now. That'd be quite the conversation.

However, a fair amount of my ambitions weren't really mine, they were just what I aspired to because I thought I was supposed to aim for such things to be a successful person. I wanted to make others happy. Gradually, I realised that making others happy wasn't enough and my ambitions shifted overtime.

Personally, one of the trickiest aspects of adjusting into early adulthood so far has been coming to terms with the fact that present me and future me are not two completely separate entities. That I am, in part but not completely, responsible for the future I create and that the milestones I've been picturing are things that might happen instead of inevitabilities. Which can be a worrying thought.

I'll admit I have a tendency to underestimate how long a task will take and attempt too much all at once. This has certainly backfired spectacularly before. Although sometimes it works out in unexpected ways. I am impatient with myself to a fault. Lately I've been trying to learn to be kinder to myself. To not stress out as much and take better care of my mental and physical state. My current ambitions are currently in question, at the moment my future seems fuzzy and I find it tricky to not panic over the lack of certainty. It's a difficult balance, planning for the future yet trying to live in the moment. One I've yet to figure out and perhaps never will, but who knows?

Isn't Mount Everest littered with the corpses of ambitious people?

^ Haha, so true. Whatever ambition you have doesn't mean a thing in the long run. My ambition in life is to like myself and i have already succeeded in that. I am content

I sometimes think that the current approach for dealing with Asperger's is off target.

We (Aspies) have existed for a long time, thousands of years. We have been part of society. But something is off target.

I think too much effort has been applied to identify Asperger's as some type of disease that needs to be fixed and that only medication/drugs is the only available tool. What if this approach is wrong, DEAD WRONG.

My brain is different than most other people. I attribute this to a massive brain injury when I was a little child. But I survived and lived a good and productive life. And I never used drugs to compensate for the severe pain I was dealt growing up.

So here I am 73 years old. Eleven months ago, I suffered a massive stroke which destroyed about 2 percent of my brain cells (and memory). But because our brains uses a type of serial circuitry, around 20 percent of my brain was taken off-line. And yet here I still am. I lost my ability to read. I couldn't even read one word after the stroke. As I looked at the letters, they broke apart right before my eyes and became an entirely new alphabet system. One I could not read. (I worked very hard and regained that ability back. It took me 20 minutes to read a single 3 letter word at the beginning. But now I am around the 8th grade level or maybe higher.) After the stoke, I also lost about 90 percent of my words. Try to carry on a conversation with only a small sample of your words. You will sound like an idiot. And I also lost my right side vision in each eye. My eyes see it but it does not travel into my brain. It is lost in transit. I am slowly putting back the pieces because that is the way my brain works. It is one fantastic brain.

I had ambitions. I guess I can say I actually met them.

Except the wife bit.

I haven't had ambitions like that. Career, money, house, well I wanted children but it wasn't an ambition.
But I had other ambitions, like learning more about and getting better at things that interests me. I still have a bit of those ambitions, but most often I don't care anymore.

/Mats