Most of us in the entrepreneurial community are blessed — or cursed — with higher-than-average ambition. Ambitious people strongly desire accomplishments and are willing to take more risks and spend more effort to get them.
Overall, this is a positive quality, especially for people trying to build their own businesses. Apparently, if you’re more naturally driven to set goals, you are more likely to succeed.
Actually, this isn’t always the case. In fact, in some cases, extreme ambition may end up doing more harm than good.
One major side effect of excessive ambition is the tendency to focus too determinedly on one particular vision or end goal. This is problematic because it hinders your ability to adapt to new circumstances, which is vital if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. If a new competitor emerges to threaten your business, you may need to change direction, even if that means straying from your original vision. If you have too much ambition, you’ll find this hard, if not impossible.
Few people are successful when they try to build their first brand. Unfortunately, for the most ambitious entrepreneurs, a failure is seen as disastrous, and impossible to recover from.
It’s a clear departure from the intended plan toward the intended goal. For people with limited ambition, however, failure is viewed as something closer to reality. Remember, failure is inevitable, and every failure you survive is a learning experience.
Ambitious people tend to be more materialistically successful than their non-ambitious counterparts. However, they’re only slightly happier than their less-ambitious counterparts, and tend to live significantly shorter lives. This implies that even though ambitious people are more likely to achieve conventional “success,” such success means nothing for their health and happiness — and if you don’t have health and happiness, what else could possibly matter?
Clearly, some amount of ambition is good for your motivation. Without any ambition, you wouldn’t start your own business, set or achieve goals and get far in life. But an excess of ambition can also be dangerous, putting you at risk of burnout, stubbornness and even a shorter life.
