The Downside of Ambition Nobody Talks About

What ambition gives you, what it quietly takes, and how I'm trying to find the balance.

I built the business of my dreams.

I got married, bought our dream home, and we built a life that, on paper, looks exactly like the one I used to sketch out in my head during the early years when everything felt possible, but nothing was certain yet.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized I had barely stopped to feel it all. Not because I wasn’t grateful, and not because I didn’t recognize how far I’d come. But because my brain had basically already moved on to the next thing.

That’s the part nobody warns you about when you’re a driven person. What gets you here doesn’t come with an off switch. It just keeps running, keeps scanning, and keeps asking what’s next.

Ambition is a beautiful thing. The relentless pursuit, the refusal to settle, the "what's next" energy that takes something that exists in your head and turns it into something you actually built. I’ve operated from that place for most of my adult life, and I won’t pretend it hasn’t served me well. But there’s a shadow side to it that I think we, especially founders and creators who have genuinely built something meaningful, don’t talk about honestly enough. When “what’s next” becomes your permanent default setting, you lose the ability to actually sit inside your own wins. Every milestone quietly becomes a launchpad rather than a landing place. Every achievement gets almost immediately reframed as the foundation for something bigger, something better, something more. It sounds like drive, and it looks like ambition. And in many ways it is. But it’s also, if you’re being really honest with yourself, a kind of restlessness that never fully lets you rest.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself whether there’s actually a balance here, and I’m genuinely not sure there is, at least not in the clean way we’d like it to look. Because from the inside, growth and restlessness feel almost identical. Both keep you moving, both keep you hungry, and both have a way of making stillness feel a little dangerous. Like if you stop pushing even briefly, something important could slip away. I'm not sure we're meant to turn it off, and I don't think I'd even want to. But there's a difference between drive that's pulling you toward something and drive that's just running on autopilot, and I think a lot of us spend more time in the second one than we'd like to admit. The creator economy makes this harder to navigate because there is always a next level available. A new revenue stream, a bigger audience, a better deal, a more refined version of your brand. The culture rewards the pursuit so consistently that pausing starts to feel almost irresponsible, like you’re leaving something on the table just by being where you are.

And I’ve started to wonder whether what we call “staying hungry” is sometimes really just an inability to feel full, no matter how much we’ve actually built.

I don’t have an answer here; I wish I did. But what I’m slowly teaching myself is that I don’t always have to be on (and I mean that in every sense of the word). It bleeds into everything. My house. My relationships. My own personal growth. There is always something I’m actively working on, always a project, always a next step, always a better version of something just around the corner. And for a long time, I genuinely thought that was just who I was, maybe even something to be proud of. But lately, I’ve been wondering if some of it is just an inability to let things be finished. To look around at the life I’ve built, in work and at home, and actually decide that it’s good and worthy of being present in.

I think about the version of me that was just starting out, who would have given anything to be exactly where I am right now. And I wonder what she would think about the fact that I’m still looking ahead, still restless, still mentally redecorating a room that doesn’t need to be touched. I think she’d tell me to just look around for a minute to take it in and to let it be enough. Not because the drive is gone, but because the life is real and it’s here and it’s mine.

The most ambitious thing I’m working on right now, maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on, is learning how to just be here. Some days I’m better at it than others, but I think that’s the work worth doing.

xx

Lindsay