Ambition, Regret and Refinement

Ambition is highly regarded in our culture—we should “dream big,” “go for the gold,” it is the “secret.”  We honor ambition and swim in it.  We are surrounded by messages of more and better.  You cannot pick up a magazine without feeling the ambition to be skinnier, richer, have more wristwatches or faster cars.  We are surrounded by encouragement to want more, have more, and produce more.What is the effect of ambition?Some say that ambition will make you more successful, it will help you overcome your resistance, it will make you “go for it.”  In my experience, we are how we are.  Some people are go for it people and they are successful with that.  Some of those people are happy and some are not.  If you are a go for it person, you will be unable not to go for it.  If you are not, ambition may play a different role in your life.The side-effect of ambition, for many people, is a feeling of lack.  The more that people yearn for, the more aware they become of what they don’t have.  Life will seem like it is lacking something.  We may actually have abundant lives full of wonderful things, events, and people, but the culture of ambition may take its luster away.Regret is the same as ambition, but instead of projecting into the future, we project lack into our past, we wish we had done more, had more, made different decisions.  Why?  Because then we would have more now.  Regret is useless and handicapping.  It is also a form of ambition, showing itself in a different form and ambition can be debilitating, even depressing, for many people.What most people say or fear is that if they let go of regret and ambition, they would do nothing; they would have no mode of moving forward, for improving their lives.  Except in a few, ambition either does not create success or creates the wrong success for the wrong reasons.But how does one grow, improve, have more of what matters?What I have seen work for most people, is to stop the need to drive toward anything and to continue to refine themselves, taking what they have, who they are, and making it better.I read an article about Malcolm Gladwell’s idea of 10,000 hours to master anything.  It said that just doing something for 10,000 hours did not convey mastery, but rather 10,000 hours of refinement were needed, working to improve, seeking how to do it better, to be more efficient.  What gives mastery to life and to you is the desire to improve upon who you are and how you do what you do. If ambition inspires you to refine yourself, it may be helpful, but the cost of the feeling of constant lack may not be worth it.I believe it is better to be grateful for what you have, to appreciate who you are here and now; and as you engage in your life, to be in a constant state of refinement, making small adjustments to make life more efficient, effective, joyful, abundant, inspiring, skillful, and open (or whatever qualities you want to have more of), and through this process more of what you want will come to you.Refinement is less flashy, it is in the trenches, it requires us to see and accept ourselves the way we are, to recognize our skills and talents and our limitations.  It asks us to appreciate our lives as they are and through focus on improvement and small victories trust that the right abundance will come to us, the abundance that fits us, the abundance that we really want.The side effect of refinement is skillfulness, amplification of the best parts of us, harmony, inner peace, gratitude, mastery, and solid, grounded abundance.What do you want to refine in yourself?