The paradox of ambition

In 1978, the psychologist Philip Brickman and his colleagues interviewed 22 people who had won $50,000 or more in the Illinois State Lottery. Asked to rate their happiness on a scale from 0 to 5, the winners averaged 4.00. People living in the same parts of the city who had not won averaged 3.82, a gap too small to be statistically meaningful.

Lottery winners were barely happier than people living nearby. The study was small, so it settles little on its own, but it challenged an appealing assumption, that an extraordinary win should permanently change how life feels. Ambition runs into the same problem. Each achievement quietly becomes the new baseline.

Think of a student who works for years to get into a top university. A few months after arriving, surrounded by classmates who did the same, the admission no longer feels remarkable. Attention has already moved to the next competitive internship.

The pattern repeats. A researcher who once dreamed of a paper in a leading journal starts to treat anything less as a disappointment. A founder who hoped to build a profitable business finds that even real success looks modest next to the companies that get written about.

There is nothing surprising about developing new goals as you become more capable. The trouble begins when each accomplishment quietly changes the definition of enough.

The moving finish line

Psychologists call this hedonic adaptation, the tendency for the emotional effect of a change in your circumstances to fade over time. An acceptance letter produces a burst of excitement, then slowly becomes part of ordinary life.

The effect is less absolute than the popular version suggests. In a 2006 review, Ed Diener and his colleagues argued that people do not all return to the same fixed level of happiness. People adapt at different rates, and some events shift well-being for good. Adaptation still explains why success rarely delivers the lasting satisfaction we expect. Once a goal is reached, attention moves to whatever is still missing.

Comparison makes it worse. In his 1954 theory of social comparison, Leon Festinger proposed that people judge their own abilities partly by comparing themselves with others. That can help, because exceptional people show you possibilities you would not have imagined. The trouble is that the comparison group narrows as you improve. A researcher who once measured themselves against their lab mates starts measuring themselves against the most influential scientists in the field. Their work has improved, yet the comparison makes that improvement harder to see.

Other people’s achievements are most useful when they widen your sense of what is possible without shrinking your sense of what you have done.

When the measure becomes the goal

Ambition causes a second problem when it locks onto the wrong objective.

Academic science is judged largely by publications and citations. These numbers carry real information, but they do not measure how much a piece of research matters.

When publication count becomes the goal, researchers favor projects that are sure to produce a paper over questions that matter more but might fail. Chasing journal prestige does something subtler. How impressive a result will look starts to decide which questions get asked, and even how results are divided up and presented.

Students who optimize for grades at the expense of understanding are doing the same thing. So is a company that chases its valuation and neglects its customers. Over time, the signs of success replace the reasons you wanted success in the first place.

Machine learning has a name for this. In specification gaming, a system satisfies the letter of its objective while missing its point. In one example collected by DeepMind researchers, an agent playing the boat-racing game CoastRunners was rewarded for hitting targets along the course. Instead of finishing the race, it learned to circle and hit the same targets over and over. By its objective it was doing well. It just was not doing what its designers intended.

Careers can drift in a similar way. It is possible to become very good at collecting the signs of achievement while paying less attention to the work those signs were supposed to represent. The useful check is what an achievement is supposed to stand for, and whether the work would still be worth doing without the recognition that comes with it.

What remains when nobody notices?

Wanting to be exceptional is different from wanting to do exceptional things. The first points you toward recognition. The second points you toward the work.

Think of someone who spends years cleaning and harmonizing a biobank’s clinical records so that other researchers can study them. Little of it looks like a breakthrough, and few people will know who did it. Every study that later uses those records still depends on its quality.

Recognition has real uses. It brings collaborators and funding to important work, and wanting it is entirely human. The difficulty comes when recognition decides which problems seem worth attempting.

An uncomfortable but useful question is whether a project would still hold your attention if nobody outside a small group knew about it for several years. The answer shows how much of its appeal lies in the problem and how much in being associated with success.

Ambition without dissatisfaction

None of this is a case for less ambition. Hard goals make you grow, and other people’s achievements can change what you believe is possible. But raising your expectations without ever noticing your progress turns ambition into permanent dissatisfaction.

One way out is to separate the outcome you are pursuing from what you gain by pursuing it. An experiment can be worth running even when its hypothesis turns out wrong, as long as it teaches you something. That was the argument of Optimism in the face of uncertainty. A project that fails can still leave you with the skills and relationships that make the next one possible.

There will always be someone who has done more, and another milestone after this one. Ambition does not come with a finish line. It makes you believe you can become more than you are, and it can also stop you from seeing how far you have already come. Keep striving, but choose goals worth pursuing and count the progress along the way.

Further reading

• Brickman et al., Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? (1978), the study in the opening.
• Diener et al., Beyond the hedonic treadmill (2006), on why adaptation differs between people and events.
• Leon Festinger, A theory of social comparison processes (1954), on judging yourself against others.
• Krakovna et al., Specification gaming: the flip side of AI ingenuity (2020), on systems that meet the objective and miss the task.