soft ambition

how to do hard things (part one)

In the two years since I’ve been out of college, I’ve been mulling over a broader theme of how to do hard things?!. This is part one of that thesis, on soft ambition.

a chill summer afternoon in new york

My friends are often shocked when I describe myself as unambitious and undisciplined.

But… you work a fast-paced job, live in New York City, and have been writing a monthly email to 50 friends for the last three years?

The truth is that I am a big fan of quitting things that feel hard and only doing things when I feel like it. And recently, I’ve found my ambitions repeatedly questioned and immensely frustrating to explain.

All around me in New York, I see people working crazy hours and sleeping very little to chase their really cool and big dreams. In a city that admires hard work, I feel quite afraid to express my dislike of working hard. There is a pressure to follow suit to compete: stay late at the office, run marathons, and collect credentials and friends alike like they’re Pokémon. Sometimes it’s explicit, and sometimes it’s a guilt-inducing whisper.

And it is totally true. You can get places by working really fucking hard.

For a while I tried. I thought that fighting uphill battles was the key to happiness. But each time I reached a new peak I couldn’t help but wonder what it was all for.

I was raised by two immigrant parents who moved to the US with nothing and have been working hard for the last 30 years to survive. While I never struggled physically, I struggled mentally after repeatedly working through failed exams, jobs, and relationships. In hindsight, I was desperately competing against my classmates in competitions that just weren’t for me.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I never really cared about winning, but I was always afraid of falling behind. I’ve learned that I am not built to bang my head on the same problems over and over until I overcome them. Instead I’ve learned how to reframe ambition in gentler ways. I’ve come to love how I can make progress without working hard. And it’s grown to become one of my favorite parts about myself!

how i practice soft ambition

Two years ago, I wrote, illustrated, and self-published a childrens book just for funsies because I had a bunch of free time. The other day, one of my coworkers found it through the depths of the internet, recorded a video of him reading it to his child, and dropped the video in our team chat to “toot my horn.” It was sweet and made me happy, but I was surprised to see how impressed everyone else was, because it didn’t feel hard to do.

my friend’s cat reading the book

Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot better at following through and finishing daunting projects. Looking back, I have to thank my soft ambition. A lot of these life lessons are pretty obvious in hindsight, but I’m grateful to have gone through these arcs regardless because it’s unlocked a lot of joy and peace in my life.

This is how I’ve come to practice soft ambition.

committing correctly

The fun thing about life is that there are usually so many other things we could possibly be doing that when something is not working maybe it’s time to try something else.

I wasn’t planning on writing a childrens book in 2022 when I first started. Instead, I had been conducting research on the effects of social media on children for my college senior thesis. Coming off of two big tech internships working on major social media platforms, I was eager to create a pamphlet to educate children on the adverse effects of social media addiction. When I proposed this format to my thesis advisors, I was met with disapproval from my primary thesis advisor. Beyond the friction between us, I slowly felt myself falling out of love with the project, slugging through the research knowing I wouldn’t be able to land the impact I wanted to with this research in the format I wanted to present it in. Following some long-winded email attempts to convince her, I quit the thesis altogether and decided to pour the extra 20+ hours a week I had into figuring out how to create a childrens book.

not everything is an uphill battle

The difficult thing about latching onto ultra-specific paths, milestones, and goals is that there are so many variables that can get in the way. Maybe it’s a stubborn thesis advisor, but it could be a lack of funds or an uncooperative client. It requires quite a bit of force to achieve. And there is nothing wrong with that—grit is an objectively useful skill. But really trying and failing over and over again is very hard and painful. I’d rather put it on the backburner and try something else, or come back to this again when the timing makes it easier.

I’ve also found that there will be signs of compatibility along the way. As soon as I pivoted to working on my childrens book, I was met with noticeably less roadblocks. Everything was under my own control and I could feel the compatibility of the project to my personal interests and goals. I spent a lot of time on it, but I was energized and motivated by it.

A friend at work once told me that our interviews are “easy for the right people and hard for the wrong people”, and I’ve thought about that quite a bit as I’ve been interviewing candidates more and more. A good interview is decently representative of the job. You talk to a person that works there and answer curated questions made to test fit. Landing the thing itself without working painfully hard is probably good signal of how hard you’ll actually be working on the job. This is another reason why cheating your way in can be harmful in the long-run.

The same thing applies to relationships, and everything you have to work for and work on. Now, when I look back at the people, places, and things that have rejected me, I see it as a blessing to not have forced myself in too hard because I likely would have struggled in those positions.

I know this because I’ve been there too. I’ve had easy relationships and hard relationships. Easy jobs and hard jobs. Working hard is really valuable and rewarding, but I’ve learned that it’s crucial to watch out for when hard work becomes forcing myself into a mold I’ll never fully be comfortable in.

forcing functions

A forcing function is a constraint that helps guide and facilitate action. They work by eliminating choice and help to unintentionally build habits.

When I had set the broader goal of publishing a childrens book, without fully knowing it, I set a bunch of forcing functions to make this easy:

• I had no background in how to put a book together. To learn how to use the adobe suite from photoshop to typography, I asked my local coffee shop if they needed any digital design help. That summer, I redesigned their website, created flyers for their events, and designed their new logo and merch. I took what I learned and immediately applied it to my book every day. All while sipping on the unlimited free coffee I was compensated with. I even got to give out copies of my book at the cafe at the end of the summer!

• I also travelled a ton that year, going to a different city every month. In every city, I made it a point to go into every bookstore I saw to flip through childrens books for research. This turned out to be an incredible way to explore the demographics and cultures around the world. I gained a ton of inspiration and motivation from it.

  

  my camera roll in summer 2023

• The fact that I was starting my first full-time job at the end of the summer was the ultimate forcing function. I assumed that this book was either going to get published before I started work or it would never see the light of day, and that really motivated me to keep to the deadline.

hard work can feel easy

The active energy of being disciplined is the part that feels hard. But motivation is often fleeting. This is why forcing functions are so incredible—they allow you to practice discipline and inspire motivation without feeling the friction.

For years, I’d been circling around this answer, and all along I had been doing it. This is why a few months of improv classes brought out my whimsy at work, why writing every day for a month with my coworkers made us more habitual writers, and why I’m never going to miss a solidcore class with a cancellation fee (even if its at 7 am). These are all just forcing functions and I am but a mere follower.

embracing what works for me

Overall, redefining what ambition can mean and look like to me has been super empowering.

Finishing the childrens book project, from writing to illustrating to compiling and self-publishing, was, in hindsight a pretty pivotal project, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. It was one of the earliest proofs that I could do hard things, completely for myself just because I wanted to! A lot of cool things have come out of it too—conversations and even friendships with unexpected people, writing growth, and most importantly, embracing the soft ambition I carry.

It is the same soft ambition that brings me to spend my weekend thinking about these things, reading people’s stories, and putting these thoughts into words. It’s pretty much responsible for everything I’ve done in the last few years and my mental health, and that’s why it’s become one of my favorite things about myself!

closing this out with some of my favorite related personal essays:

• Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process by Henrik Karlsson

• In praise of quitting by Cate Hall

• against brute forcing by Ava

• That Sounds Fun by Annie Downs (this is a book)