So i turned 18 a few weeks ago, and i always was an ambitious person. I have big dreams and i work for it. My biggest dream, like a lot of people, is to be rich, and successful in general. I love entrepreneurial stuff, i have a business and i earn a little money from it.
But when i see the future i only think about money, or success… I literally won’t be able to see myself later if i don’t realize my dreams.. I know i’ll regret it my whole life. But im not dumb, i know that being successful is very hard, especially for a girl. I know that a lot of people fail those kind of things but i literally CANT see myself fail.. I don’t even know how it would feel if at the end of my life, i failed to be the person i wanted to be. Just thinking about it makes me nauseous..
I want to do so many things, but at the same time i don’t know what to do. i have too many thoughts, too many fears, that i don’t even know where to start. And at the same time the time is passing, and i feel so helpless..
I know that it’s very hard to do but i want to make my friends and my family proud of me, meet the people that i always admired, and live the life that i always wanted to live. Some of my goals are almost impossible to reach, but my heart still wants to try, like it was easy when it’s not. i don’t know what to do.. i’m so lost
being ambitious is killing me
byu/portgasdlana inEntrepreneur
Posted by portgasdlana
35 Comments
not “being ambitious” is killing you, but expecting to “succeed” in a given way is killing you
resolve your habits of pain, pay attention to habits of love (hobbies)
if it’s not a habit of love, it’s not a hobby – if you don’t like chess, it’s not a hobby
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society has an illness. actually, many. society has many illnesses.
the paradigm of goals is useful only when we want to follow the footsteps of someone.
typical goals do not help in achieving something SPECIFIC AND AMBITIOUS
for someone, becoming a millionaire might be ambitious, but for someone it’s routine
you are saying “this is ambitious”, it’s an ambitious goal
anything ambitious should not be a specific goal, because it becomes deceptive
when you are ambitious, you are going through the fog, where nobody has ever been before
it does not make sense to imagine a definite 100 step map when you are going through the fog
BUT WHAT MAKES SENSE
is to trace your steps, so you can always go back to where you came from
CREATE THE MAP WHILE EXPLORING
in other words
create the map of what is known (as a preparation) then look for what is unknown and seek to expand the map
that is what it means to be ambitious
Spend time with a psychologist
I know this isn’t the typical *reddit entrepreneurship advice* but I think you should see a therapist. From what you described, your mental health seems to be lacking. Wish you well.
Everyone can dream. Hope this helps.
Learning to take advantage of what you already have is the basis. Knowing how to satisfy yourself is one of the hardest things in today’s society
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious. Mostly highly intelligent people are ambitious. However, real problem arises when you starts living in fools paradise and cut yourself from reality. In your case there is nothing wrong with trying to become financially successful or making life easy for your loved ones, but if you try to achieve way too much in way too little time than you will lose nothing less than your health and top of that your mental peace.
First of all, stop trying to impress your family/friends. Real family/friends will never love you because you are successful but because you matter to them. If you try to get love due to money then they will only love you due to money. Once money is gone so does the love. Relationships are meant to be selfless.
Second, discuss your goals with someone experienced to get a reality check. Goals and ambitions are only helpful if they are tangible and break them into small achievable milestones. Otherwise, you will only waste your time to know than you were a fool to set unrealistic goals.
Third, there is nothing in this world more important than mental piece. Once it’s gone than money, relationships, etc. nothing will give you happiness. There is a famous saying that Money only enhances what you have, if you have happiness money will enhance it if you have sadness money will enhance it. It will never give you happiness. Real happiness comes from within and people only love to be around those who are happy not those who are always emitting negative energy. The best way to achieve mental peace is practicing gratitude, make it a habit. Once you are mentally at peace you your working power will enhance drastically.
Lastly, things will only happen when they are supposed to be never ever rush, Learn to wait.
You’re telling yourself a lot of stories that have a lot of terrible consequences but don’t require much from you.
“Being ambitious is killing me.”
“I’ll regret it my whole life (if I don’t realize my dreams).”
“Being successful is hard.”
Those stories are not necessarily true, and they’re definitely not helpful. You don’t have to go with them. Who told you those things the first time? They weren’t right.
I can understand it bro I am 25 and suffering from the same thing from the age of 17 just be focus and confidence built yourself strong because our hunger never fulfil if you want to discuss or share you can connect with me.
It’s completely normal to feel overwhelmed when you have big dreams, especially at a young age. Focus on breaking down your goals into smaller, manageable steps, and remember that failure is a part of growth—it doesn’t define you but rather shapes your path to success.
Don’t look at it as a negative… relish the fact you’ve got clear drive. The faster you acknowledge it and look at it in a positive way, the faster it likely ends up being a driving factor towards your success.
Hi, started my first business in college and felt this way for many years. The feeling starts to go away around year 5 and you kinda settle down. Of course the goals all remain but the non-stop self pressure does eventually ease up
Take baby steps.
Sounds like adhd. Welcome to the club
Hardest thing i’m facing right now BUT fortunately i’m thinking about ideas and WORKING ON THEM (yes most of the time you fail but that how the game works)
All you have to do is find your INTEREST AND PASSION if you can’t do that it’s going to be really hard
Bro I was like this. still like this. And it’s exhausting. Find help before you spiral. Maybe could be symptoms of ADHD. Talk to a psychiatrist
Spoken like a young version of the CEO of nestlé. That is not a compliment lol
Killing yourself about the future has no effect except making you not live the present. I have the same problem. Try and take life 1 minute at a time. This helped me a lot to stay more in the present.
Bless your heart, so you were born cursed with glorious purpose. You’re already rich and don’t know it. The most valuable resource available to all is time. Most trade their time for money and think money is valuable because of what they had to trade to obtain it. But try as they might, they cannot trade their wealth for time.
Research compounding interest and dividends, learn what the SPY is. Ever had a teach who said math was important, and you said I will never use this math… Well, now it’s time to use that math.
If you can’t see yourself fail you can’t be an entrepreneur, embracing failure is how people become successful (be it rich, skilled whatever) because it’s not a stopping factor once you embrace it, it’s about failing, learning and getting back up. So stay ambitious and learn from failures
Wow, you’re exactly like another me.😂chill out a little bit would be better, Meditation could help. And in fact, I don’t see being a female as harder to succeed..anyway FIGHTING
Wealth is a sign of, but isn’t the definition of success.
Stop focusing on accumulating wealth and you’ll be much happier almost right off the bat.
Then focus on your ambitions. Go do something. Build something. Be something… Whatever your goal is.
Shoot for your impossible dreams, and see what comes of your efforts.
The money will come later on.
Accept that you will fail at some point, but that failure doesn’t mean what you think it does. Many successful people fail many times, it doesn’t prevent them from being successful.
Failure is a time to learn. Failing once and quitting is true failure. Failing, learning and trying again is simply developing as a person and honing your entrepreneurial skills.
🙂
I know it’s difficult but you have to learn to relax. Sometimes I am over anxious about things because I wanted to do my best. Things that help me when I’m super anxious about results is I walk outside and feel the wind. I also keep reminding myself, it’s okay to fail, it’s the necessary ingredients to success, the more I fail, the more I know my weakness, overcome it and the closer I am to success. If you don’t experience failure, you can never be successful.
When confused what to do, don’t overthink it, just pick a stuff, and do it first, others things you want to learn can wait after the first stuff done. Concentrate. Usually, after I accomplish a task, my dopamine will rise, help me relax and can futher ahead plan super long liat of things i wanna learn.
Oh, I just remember, I used pop music, upbeat music to closed voice in my head when studying 😂.
Someone ever told me ” Life is a daring adventure, you can choose to live that out of fear or ….
It’s okay to be afraid, it’s okay to fail your career, your friend, family and entire life. You just have to move on. hug yourself, pat yourself, don’t beat yourself, life is when one door closed, another door open. I hope you are happy, take care of yourself if you lose your insanity before success it will be wasteful…….
I just sat on my newly bought glasses and bent the metal both side , I’m done, my mother will kill me🥲How to fix it?
Failure doesn’t come as a slap in the face.
It comes as waiting in a long line. You’re waiting and waiting and you think about quiting. But you persist and wait some more. And when you’ve waited long enough and you don’t care about the result anymore, because you mostly want to get over with, the result comes to you. And it’s a piece of shit.
You can be as ambitious as you want. You’ll still wait in that line.
And the result is not guaranteed.
Delete social media chill out and get in touch with nature and more sacred things
Wait until you wake up one day and realize success and money don’t equate to happiness and all this angst was misplaced. Nothing wrong with ambition or dreams or chasing some money but it’s only a piece of a very long and complex formula.
You cant be the person you want to be if you don’t accept failure being one of the main reasons you will eventually become that person.
Hi dear,
I’m really impressed by your ambition and drive. As a business owner, I believe you’d be a great fit for my team. I’d love to discuss how we might work together and help you achieve your goals.
Let’s chat soon!
Best,
Kaushik
Just try. Accept that successful people fail the most. Failure is inevitable. If your goals are almost impossible accept they won’t happen.
Doesn’t mean you can’t still try. But a wise entrepreneur will invest time and energy into the right activities and that’s what makes them successful.
Also you can reframe your ambitions. Instead of thinking of the final goal think of the process as the success. Eg. If you are making music every day that is a success. If you are trying to become a famous musician that is a failure.
Think of it like what is in your control. If it’s not in your control don’t put your heart into it or you will just be hurt.
Good luck!
I have a successful business that employs my friends too. We don’t always do what we want but we make good money and we live a good life helping society and ourselves.
Dude same and I am almost 23.
I want to do so much and be so much but I do not even know where to start to be succesful?
I think of my future as this magical place where I have it all but I do not know how to get myself there. I want to be the one that retire my mom but this is not gonna happen if I dont have anything going on for me right now.
I feel like I am easily overwhelmed and lack long term vision. I try to watch YT videos to get ideas, motivation, mentoship but I just become so fried tbh. My brain gets exhausted from consumption and at the end of the day I did not do anything.
I relate so much when I hear ADHD this ADHD that but I dont like putting myself in a box lmfao..and I really believe most of it are just being a freaking human being and a person in early 20’s? Why does have to be labeled and treated if I am unorganised.
Idkidkidk. If some functioning adult reads your post and my commeny. Any advice would help 🙏🏻
Success is mostly luck. But keep trying.
But also keep in mind that perfectionism is causing your generation a lot of mental problems
what business do u have?
One thing I realised as an ambitious person myself is number 1, ambition is not the problem.
The problem is that your mental model of how the world works is likely too simplistic, completely wrong or somewhat right but you haven’t seen or experienced enough to know for sure.
The second main issue is that success requires 3 main things:
1. Endless ambition (which is just a wild imagination)
2. A competent skillset to realise and turn what is in your imagination into tangible things in reality (stuff you can see, touch and show to other people)
3. Opportunity (some call it luck, circumstances or whatever)
Out of those three things, ambition is the only one that is innate (or at least it was something cultivated when you were super young). So the good news is that will stick with you if you don’t give up on it or see it as a bad thing.
Now, opportunity is actually more common than most people would give it credit for. This can be made more common if you start hanging out with people who are more successful or you think have more frequent opportunities. This also means saying yes to anything until your hands are full (only then can you be selective). And not dismissing things on first sight.
Finally, the competent skillset is probably the most efforful to obtain, and a lot of the doubts you have about whether it will work out or not likely comes from your skillset lagging behind your ambition. This should be the case if you’ve got endless ambition, but the key is to level up your skillset to catch up as fast as you can.
A lot of time you won’t know where to start, and that just means “you don’t know what you don’t know”. So start exploring around the things which “you know what you don’t look know” and then fix those things first.
As you learn more, the things “you don’t know you don’t know” will naturally become things “you know you don’t know”.
One last note on failure:
As you become more successful, you will fail harder and it will become more painful as time goes on (you’ll just better adapt to the pain). Instead of realising you wasted a few months on mistake, you’ll eventually get to points where you’ve wasted years on some mistake.
This is inevitable – unless you choose to not become successful.
Here’s the reason why.
There are certain decisions in life where you can find out and accurately predict the outcome before you make the decision. These are usually for stuff that lots and lots of other people have done already.
As you level up in the game, you will eventually be faced with decisions that you cannot predict the outcome for, but that you still need to know the outcome in order to progress with another part of your business.
These are stuff that not many people have done already, and because of that, they will guard that information to stay competitive.
For these decisions, the only way to know the outcome is unfortunately to pick one choice and stick to it and see it through. Only then can you know the outcome.
So you will most likely fail, but that failure is strategic. If the cost of failing is less than the opportunity cost of not knowing that information you’d gain, take that decision immediately. This is super important. Try to always compare the relative costs of failure to the opportunity cost of ignorance, and not with anything else like how comfortable it is to stay the same.
Lastly, if you take nothing else away from what I said, then watch this video by Feynman at least and apply this to all of life:
https://youtu.be/EYPapE-3FRw?si=Rc8A_LupZWEGL8pR
Learn more skills. Educate yourself while you wait. And volunteer. Volunteering will let you burnish your social skills — and you’ll need those to succeed as an entrepreneur. Friends will come later. Collect your list of “things I know how to do and have accomplished” today.
Recalibrate your goals and emotions. See r/stoicism r/CBT and r/nlp