Good Self, Bad Self: Transforming Your Worst Qualities Into Your Biggest Assets by Smith Judy

Author:Smith, Judy [Smith, Judy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Nightmare
ISBN: 9781451649994
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-04-03T07:00:00+00:00

Positive Ambition: Leading the Way

A balanced sense of ambition is about working hard on short-term goals while also planning ahead for long-term goals. As Anna Fels, MD, a psychiatrist who studies ambition, writes, “ambition requires an imagined future that can be worked toward by the development of skills and expertise.” To succeed in our ambitions, we have to simultaneously be in the moment and look toward the future, toward the consequences of our actions. We have to constantly be aware of where we are now and what we need to be striving for.

I’m sure you’ve known of people who have such tunnel vision as they strive toward a far-off ambition, such as becoming partner in a law firm or meeting the right man and settling down, that they are blind to their day-to-day life. They forgo exercise in favor of late nights eating takeout at the office, and their health suffers; or they focus on the marriage aspect of their ambition without looking closely enough at who they’re marrying and wind up unhappy. Ambition can indeed be blinding to what’s important long-term.

Why are some people really good at balancing the now and the later in their ambitions for the future and others so bad at it? Stanford University emeritus professor of psychology Philip Zimbardo believes that it’s because different people’s brains actually have different orientations toward time. Some people have what he calls a “present time orientation” and others a “future time orientation.” People with a future orientation are less impulsive, are better planners, and tend to be more tenacious.

In his book The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life, Zimbardo compares the way present- and future-oriented people solve a maze. The former leapt into the task immediately, their pencils racing down the maze’s corridors and around bends, turning around and backtracking when they hit a cul-de-sac. The people with future orientations often did not start drawing immediately. They looked at the end of the maze and backtracked toward the beginning in their minds. When they reached a branching path, they followed it with their eyes before barreling down it with their pencil. The result is that over 80 percent of the folks with future orientations solved the mazes; less than 60 percent of the people with present orientations, who picked up a pencil and started drawing immediately, finished.

Research like this confirms what I’ve noticed in my practice, namely that it’s important to look at the big picture, which means knowing your goals and developing a strategy to get there. That doesn’t mean you’ll know every detail before you begin, only that you’ll keep trying and be willing to adjust as you go.

One man who began thinking ahead at a very early age was Bill Gates. The fact that he’d be successful was obvious to those who worked with him every day, but the rest of the world was amazed when he was officially declared a billionaire days before his thirty-second birthday—making him, at the time, the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

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