Does Meditation Make You Less Ambitious?

Meditation is a great tool to help us achieve our goals, but because of the fact that it can make us calmer, some may be preoccupied with the fact that being too calm can be hurtful when it comes to ambition. Ambition is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to what we can achieve. 

But is it true that motivation can harm our ambition and thus, make us less likely to pursue our goals? While a lot points to the idea that meditation can lower your drive to pursue things, it doesn’t have to. 

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Especially if you are clear with what you want and only use meditation as a form of mental exercise. 

I often recommend people set a goal when they start meditating. This doesn’t have to pertain to a material achievement such as wealth, even though it can. 

In fact, I would say while meditation doesn’t necessarily raise your ambition, you get something more valuable out of meditation than ambition or meditation could give you, thus, making it more likely you attain what you set to achieve. 

Too Much Obsession Can Make Us Lose Track

When you’re too obsessed with an ambition you have, you tend to forget that there’s a journey behind it. There’s a difference between the happiness you feel during the path of the pursuit and the happiness you feel once you attain a specific goal. Reaching a goal will make you feel amazing in most cases, there’s no doubt about that. 

But how long will that happiness last? There’s an entire journey behind it. If you are solely obsessed with the end goal, you’re not guaranteed to reach it, unless you go through a rigorous process of discipline and willpower. 

The average individual doesn’t have it. Many tend to want the result without putting in the work, and because the work is so overwhelming, they tend to give up on that end goal. 

However, if, in contrast, you don’t make yourself outcome dependent, or base your identity on achieving that goal, you give yourself the freedom and permission to be happy. 

The thought process of “I’ll be happy once I achieve XYZ” is far too common, we don’t realize that there’s a path to said goal. 

The more mindful you are about this path, and the more you enjoy it, the easier it will be to achieve such ambition, and the faster you will achieve such ambition. 

Focus and Ambition

To reach your ambition, you’ll need focus, something that if you’re lacking, meditation will be able to give you. Even if you’re not naturally a focused person. Not only will meditation make you focused, but it will also make you calmer. 

It will translate into better decisions and new problem-solving avenues you might never have thought of before because of the fact that you allowed yourself to breathe. 

If your mind is fixated on something and doesn’t look at things from a third-person perspective, it’s hard to think of new solutions outside of the scope it’s been limited to. 

That is why it’s comparable to playing chess in many ways. This is not about the quantity of thoughts you have, but rather the quality. If your mind is cluttered, you’re likely to lose track. 

Now, by no means am I saying that meditation is a prerequisite for ambition to thrive, but it can be a helper, and it can help you become more independent. 

Meditation helps you detach, and while obsession is a good thing because of the clarity you have, too much obsession brings the ego into the picture, to the point where the ego can be defeated to ourselves if an outcome doesn’t match the exact expectations of the ego. 

The balance of ego, focus, and calmness sets up a favorable environment to achieve a certain ambition. 

In addition, focus helps the mind perform better at a certain path to make an ambition a reality. 

Canalizing Energy To The Ambition

When the mind lets go of judgment and allow for peaceful coexistence with thoughts, we are no longer hindered by stress or worry. 

Those things take more energy than we realize, and said energy can be destined for an ambition, contributing to our ability to achieve an ambition. With meditation, we tend to learn how to be comfortable with the present moment. 

But this may be misinterpreted in the way it affects ambition, because if we’re okay with what we presently have, why change it? This would be half true because it’s more liberating than conformism. 

By meditating, you become mindful of who you are and end up having an easier time making decisions that positively impact a goal you have. 

Just because you are okay with a present situation doesn’t mean you’ll stay there, it just means you’re not outcome-dependent and allow yourself to fail. 

Failure, at the end of the day, is just feedback and a prerequisite for achievement, as opposed to being fooled by the ego into thinking everything has to perfectly line up a certain way. We are imperfect, and plans will rarely work the exact way we intend to. 

As much as we like to think that we have control. Meditation is acceptance, understanding that there are variables outside our control, being comfortable with it and following a discipline where, independently of your ambition or motivation, you still make progress. 

Meditation vs. Ambition

When you meditate, you learn to enjoy the journey. Meditation and ambition aren’t mutually exclusive, but solely relying on ambition and seeing it as the end-all-be-all makes us lose track of what we have in front of us, and makes the mind go to a fictional future where we have said ambition achieved. 

At the end of the day, meditation is just one of the many better tools you can use to improve yourself that can complement anything else you do pertaining to your objective. 

With ambition, you don’t always have a system, you rely on a drive that, at the time of having it, can make you feel amazing, but once that drive is gone, will you still be as committed to pursuing that ambition? 

When you have a system where you keep yourself disciplined, you enjoy the journey and don’t become dependent on the outcome, you give yourself a lot more freedom to be fulfilled. 

Something that will come naturally as a byproduct of the discipline you get from meditating or doing anything that’s similar and calming the mind. With a system, which, in this case, is meditation, if you keep at it, you move forwards no matter what. 

Now, meditation may not help you directly but it can help you indirectly. You might need to build a specific habit through meditation that will allow you to achieve said ambition. 

When you meditate, you already set a track record for yourself of building habits, so building your next one becomes easier. 

And that habit you build with meditation becomes the system. A system is something that consistently takes you where you want to be in quite a linear path, without giving you an exact date as to when an ambition will become a reality. 

But that’s okay because you don’t hold on to the high expectations that at the surface would seem good, but in practice, makes you feel worse if you don’t achieve a certain ambition the way you initially had planned.