Ambition

 Sometimes I think ambition is a dirty word. It seems closely linked with feeling discontent when in fact I have a lot to be grateful for. It also seems to be linked with grandiosity. When I start to feel ambitious my ego takes over and I start to imagine myself as some kind of Nobel Prize winner, or best selling author, or grandmaster, etc. Even on a smaller scale it can be very unrealistic. There have been a number of occasions in my life where I have made decisions that came back to haunt me or I bit off more than I could chew because I felt ambitious but it was disconnected from any real honest assessment of my abilities or the challenges I would face. Many of these situations have resulted in humiliating setbacks.

 But at times it seems like a life without ambition is sad and meaningless. My job isn't bad by any means but in a lot of ways I don't feel like it is what I really want to be doing with my life. At the very least I want to have some passion project that I can derive meaning from on the side. Also, at times when I am just chasing novelty and excitement I come to a place where I feel burnt out and like I am at a dead end. But it feels like I am stuck in this dead end and it is my own fault. That momentary pleasures or just being the butterfly as one person put it inevitably leads to this kind of dead end with a kind of despair. At times like that, and at other times I feel like the solution is for me to really commit to some kind of grand project and to see it through despite whatever obstacles might come up. That this is how one finds meaning and purpose in life. At times like those it feels like ambition is the key and like I will really have to overcome my own character defects and become a better person who accomplishes things.

So basically I like the sense of purpose that ambition gives. There was a time period where I was taking chess lessons and I felt pretty happy about it because I felt like I had a goal and I was taking definite action to work toward that goal. It's exciting to feel like something is happening in my life and like I am taking action to direct my life and to have some purpose beyond just punching the clock at work, doing the dishes at home, and playing a game here and there. I think this is the good side of ambition.

 But the brutal fact is that I have been through this kind of cycle many times and no matter how sincerely I resolve to be someone who gets stuff done with ruthless efficiency I always end up wandering off the path. Usually sooner rather than later. It just seems like my inner world is very changeable. I can be very passionate about something and feel like I want to spend the rest of my life doing it one minute and the next I am bored or don't want to make the effort. Then when I feel burned out with the project and I give up I end up feeling despair that way too.

 Basically I have tried to come up with with a lot of solutions to this dilemma. And I have had some successes along the way. My mom asked me recently when was a time I felt successful. I couldn't really think of one at that moment but later I realized I felt really great when I researched building a gaming PC and planned it all out and saved up the money and bought the components and then built the PC with my own hands and got it working. That was another happy and exciting time in my life.

I guess in some ways it is the trying that kind of matters though. It is by trying stuff that I learn what works and what doesn't work. By trying to set goals I can learn what goals worked out and what goals were unreasonable. Like I set a goal to achieve an over the board (meaning real life tournaments not online) chess rating of 2000 (which is a strong rating for an amateur but still far from being a "titled" player). I was starting out as basically a novice who had only ever played casually before. Despite a lot of effort I have found this goal hasn't been very realistic. Not least because I live in a place that doesn't really have slow chess tournaments and so it is only very rarely that I can play rated over the board tournaments. So the ambition was good, it was good that I tried. And I did put quite a bit of effort into. And I can say I am glad I did. But overall the goal was unrealistic. The goal of building a gaming PC was realistic but I only learned that because I had the ambition and I tried to do it.

So, I guess my current ambition is to do some writing about gaming. That by itself is too vague and the temptation will be to just make some notes in my journal and not show it to anybody. This blog will be my outlet for the time being. One specific goal can be to let some real people know it exists. My second goal is to write 10 good entries. They can be about anything gaming related. Like book or game reviews or reports on sessions. Hopefully building up this blog can be an ambition that is something to keep coming back to and that can give me some sense of purpose but can also be definite and doable (writing individual posts). It should also be wide enough in scope that I don't have to feel chained to one particular game or even one subset of the gaming world.