Ironically, what propelled me to start reflecting on ambition was that I was pretty certain I was losing mine. In the aftermath of a hard few years, in which my mental and physical health, plans, and goals all seemed to be in varying stages of falling apart, “ambition” felt like the quality that held me together, until it didn’t anymore.
The more I thought about it, the more questions I had: If ambition felt like such a part of me that it was responsible for all the good stuff, what bad habits or mistakes or misprioritization had my own ambition enabled? If part of being ambitious at work was putting care and intention into it, then was I applying that same kind of ambition to other parts of my life?
I started asking other people those questions, too. In reporting for what would become my second book, All the Gold Stars, I heard about how ideals of ambition impacted people from an early age, via gold star stickers in school, “gifted” programs and scores, familial expectations, and more. I heard about the systemic crisis of overwork and how ambition could be used as a means of upholding it, and how it impacts workers — like a student who was navigating school and work while supporting her young son, or another who asked an employer to take back a raise after it put her over the income threshold to receive childcare assistance by 24 cents.
But I also heard how people were reimagining, or redefining, ambition on their own terms. People described being ambitious about friendship and even about fun, and being ambitious about the many forms that community can take, and what it means to take care of each other. They discussed the ambition inherent in unionizing their workplaces, building different models of work, and adding more to their definitions of ambition than professional accomplishments. Their stories gave me a deeper understanding of ambition as something that’s imaginative, collective, and grows and changes as our needs and wants do.
In my Work in Progress column for Teen Vogue, I try to approach questions from a perspective making work work for you, not the way around. To that end, the excerpt below comes from a chapter toward the end of the book about how people are rethinking ambition and work–including quitting.
The below excerpt has been condensed for clarity.
“I’ve learned lately that I’m no longer interested in ambition,” Kendra, thirty-two, wrote to me a few months before we spoke on the phone, providing me with a line I will perhaps be borrowing as an email signature.
Kendra has always been working, since she was sixteen years old and legally could. She worked full-time in college and, after finishing a bachelor’s degree in English, described how she “slipped and fell into public policy.” She loved focusing on doing good things through work: it wasn’t about the prestige or credit; it was about trying to improve communities she cares about. In 2017, she wound up getting a job in New York at what she described as an “elite” nonprofit, and that was when the pressures of ambition came to fruition. She was surrounded by people who prioritize their careers above all else—above relationships, above friends, above their own well-being. “I think some people kind of pigeonhole themselves in that isolation because they’re so focused on their career,” she told me. People kept leaving the organization, so she kept advancing.
Not only was Kendra supposed to be ambitious about work, her workplace presented an even more sinister version of ambition, framing overwork as her employer being ambitious about her. “I was getting extracted from, and that was getting reframed as, we’re just ambitious about you,” she explained. She was made to feel like she was an integral part of the organization. And suddenly, she was down a hole, with no idea how she got there.
By the time 2020—and the start of the pandemic—hit, Kendra’s struggles with anxiety and depression were hitting a fever pitch. She began thinking she didn’t want to manage a whole team and be responsible for all those people. She didn’t want to lead big strategy conversations. Rather than the workload slowing down to account for a deadly virus, her workload increased as she worked from home with the company of her cat. “I just started to self-medicate. I didn’t even have the energy to address what was going on,” she said. “I was drinking beyond excess.”
When she thought she needed to go to rehab—“I really, really needed help,” she told me—instead of her employer sitting with that conversation, they pivoted. They said her team needed her. They doubled down on her work. “Well, if they need me, I’m not going to be helpful if I die,” Kendra recounted.
That was her “I’m done” moment: the great quit. After all, she told me, our dreams might need us, but if we cease to exist, they don’t exist. The self-sacrificing in pursuit of a dream—a goal at work, a certain title, a specific job—lets us skim over a fundamental question. In Kendra’s words: “So what were you ambitious for?”
But meanwhile, work is swallowing people whole and spitting the remains out. “I think in the same way that individualistic tendencies or structures lead to this idea of ambition being like such a small, close-minded thing, I think that the opposite of that is collectivity, which is imagination, right?” Nat Baldino, the labor expert who took us through overwork’s relationship to ambition, told me. “Being able to empathize with your coworkers and not be isolated from them. That’s a form of imagination.”
We need structural changes to work that, first, don’t force us to be ambitious about something as basic as having our basic needs met; second, don’t rely on overwork as a driver of security and self-worth; and third, create collective power for workers so that people have more agency and autonomy in their lives. If it sounds too idyllic, the continuation of these fights is ongoing: according to data from the National Labor Relations Board, released in July 2022, growing numbers of workers are showing interest in joining unions; a CNBC poll found the majority of workers in the United States (59 percent) across all sectors of work said they support increased unionization in their own workplaces. A 2021 survey by Paid Leave for All Action showed that bipartisan support for paid leave is overwhelming—84 percent of voters support it. People want more time, more resources, and more support, and they are sticking together to demand it. Being ambitious about work looks like being ambitious about each other— the collective power it takes to truly change a workplace and protect life beyond it.
For some workers, like Kendra, quitting is a starting point. She instantly felt “so f***ing relieved” she had the ability to breathe again. But it took time to adjust. She launched her own consulting firm but eventually decided to close because she got “way too ambitious about that”—she couldn’t say no to anything. Eventually, Kendra found her way into a different nonprofit, one that prioritizes being more liberatory both in their mission to build the power of people of color to transform the economy and in their day-to-day options. Kendra sent me an essay she cowrote with her colleague, Azza Altiraifi, organizer and strategist, where they note they are Black women working to undo structural inequities at the intersections of white supremacy, capitalism, cis-heteronormativity, ableism, and patriarchy. During our conversation, she described how part of their process is to actually make work collective, meaning her team has conversations together with a collective decision-making process about strategy, outcomes, and shaping projects. They are intentional, she said, about stopping the power hoarding of decision-making. Even beyond that, Kendra imagines a nonprofit with no hierarchy: no executive director, all staff on the same level, with the same pay. In the essay, Kendra and Azza wrote, “Ambition creates the necessary space to imagine alternative economic arrangements, to experiment daily with liberatory ways of relating to each other and the natural world, and to reclaim the ancestral wisdom that colonialism sought to bury.” It echoed what Kendra had mentioned to me on our call: her first instinct was to abdicate her ambition. But really, she expanded it. What she is ambitious about changed, and she thinks ambition needs a reclaiming.
“I’m really ambitious about doing the least,” she told me. “I just want to be ambitious about caring for myself and caring for the people I love.” Though ambition is often tied to material things, she said, she’s getting more ambitious about her values. One example that comes to mind is when she was recruited to lead communications for a huge organization, a role that came with a significant title and, in theory, a bigger role. The answer was a hard no.
Often, saying no can look like saying yes to other parts of ourselves–the parts that will remain when we’re too sick to work, if we get fired, when we yearn to be someone who is more than the last task they completed. When we can, saying no to something at work can mean saying yes to so many other things.
Saying no when we can and quitting if we can matters. But if we offload changing how work functions to quitting and quitting alone, eventually we’ll run into the same problems at our next job, and even if we don’t, a friend, neighbor, or coworker will because, ultimately, “it’s not you,” Baldino told me. “It’s the nature of work itself.”
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