Return on Ambition

A Radical Approach to Your Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being

Nicolai Chen Nielsen, Nicolai Tillisch

• Publisher: Fast Company Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781734324860
• eBook ISBN: 9781734324877
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

How do you become highly successful—while living a fulfilling life and growing as a person?

Most ambitious people struggle in at least one of these areas, yet they feel they don't have the tools to improve their situation. Return on Ambition is the culmination of an ambitious effort to harness insights from recent research in psychology and neuroscience to help people pursue their ambitions more fruitfully. The result is a radical and holistic approach to achievement, growth, and well-being that includes:

• The Return on Ambition Self-Assessment: instructive, clear measures of how well you are currently doing in getting the return you aspire to

• The Trinity of Achievement, Growth, and Well-Being: research and wisdom that show that compromises in any of these three elements will cause declines in the others over time

• The 7 Frenemies: descriptions of personal attributes that are your core strengths as an ambitious person, but that can also be the biggest obstacles to your success and fulfillment in life

• The Return on Ambition Toolbox: 4 tools that will help you articulate and pursue your ambition, expand your self-awareness, and help you learn consciously

• 4 Self-Coaching Sessions: instructions for 30–60-minute contemplations inspired by thought-provoking questions

Nielsen and Tillisch have tried-and-tested experience inside the world of grand ambitions. This means that readers will find not only concepts brought to life with rich interviews and stories, but also two authors who inherently understand their audience.

Nicolai Chen Nielsen is an associate partner at McKinsey & Company, where he advises clients on leadership development, culture change, and agile transformations. He is the co-author of Leadership at Scale and has published several articles on personal development. He is currently based in New York with his wife, Samira, and their two dogs, Napoleon and Caesar.

Nicolai Tillisch works with Cultivating Leadership, the global coaching firm, and is a co-founder of Deliberate Development, the venture behind the StepUpYourDay software solution. He has been a consultant with McKinsey & Company and was an executive with DDB Worldwide, Hutchison, and Nokia Siemens Networks. Nicolai lives with his wife Ida and their children, Margaux and Axel, in Denmark.

PART 1

What Is Your Return on Ambition?

PART 1 HELPS you answer the first key question of the book: What is your Return on Ambition? Here we introduce the core concept of Return on Ambition, which is made up of two elements: your ambition itself and the holistic returns you are getting in terms of achievement, growth, and well-being. We then break down these two elements. We review the premises of your ambition, which serve as a point of departure for assessing your returns. Then we present a quantitative assessment to measure your returns and review the underlying areas that have an impact on your Return on Ambition.

ONE

The Core Concept

Invest your ambition wisely. It can fuel your future and drive society forward, but left unchecked, it can lead to bankruptcy and despair.

WE DEFINE AMBITION as “a powerful yearning and drive to attain a future state that is different from today and challenging to reach.”

This definition is a slight stretch compared to the dictionary’s version, but if any word should have a grander definition, this is the one. “Future states” can be anything from buying a villa with a garage sheltering a nice sports car to raising a flourishing family to making the world a better place—or, indeed, a combination of all the above. “Yearning” is attached to “drive” to signify that you are determined to realize your ambition and not purely dreaming, while “different” and “challenging” emphasize that reaching your ambition requires a real effort.

To further elaborate on the concept of ambition, let’s use money as a metaphor. Money is neither inherently good nor bad. It is a medium for making things happen, rather like the fuel that powers a car. Our society is built on people’s eagerness to invest their money and earn more. For some people, having a lot is important. For others, it is secondary. Everyone can benefit from maximizing their money’s return (measured broadly and not just in financial terms). However, handled wrongly or irresponsibly, money can lead to ruin.

Much in the same way as money, ambition in itself is neither inherently good nor bad; rather, it is a fuel for attaining a future state that is meaningful and different from today. Your specific purpose and degree of ambition is personal, and more is not necessarily better. However, all ambitious people invest time, energy, and resources in their ambitions, and they expect a return from all their efforts.

The Return on Ambition Equation

You can consider your ambition and your return in many ways. Some people like quiet contemplation. Others think with a piece of paper in front of them. Some talk with their friends, relatives, and mentors. Others formalize the process with a coach. In any case, reflection helps. We’ve found that ambitious people who can carve out the time for personal reflection are more than four times as likely to reach their aspirations—while maintaining a high degree of growth and well-being—as those who don’t make time for this. On the other hand, people who do not take the time for personal reflection are 62% more likely to struggle to prioritize competing commitments and 2.1 times more likely to be stressed than those who do make time for personal reflection. They’re also more likely to doubt whether the effort they are putting into realizing their ambitions is really worth it.¹

While simply paying more attention to your current Return on Ambition is helpful, it is not the full answer. You also need to know where to look for inspiration, what drives your return, and how you could do things better.

Let’s start by defining Return on Ambition holistically, with an equation outlined in Figure 1.1. We measure your Return on Ambition as the sum of your achievement, growth, and well-being.

Figure 1.1—The Return on Ambition Equation

This holistic view of ambition includes the degree to which you achieve meaningful personal and professional goals, your degree of learning and development, and your level of personal happiness, purpose, health, and connection. It stems from a complete picture of what it means to be a fulfilled human being, and is consistent with ancient wisdom traditions, more modern research, and indeed in our own research and practice.

You should not focus only on your returns, however. Your degree of achievement, growth, and well-being are all functions of your specific ambition. For instance, if you want to become a top tennis player, you would evaluate how you’re doing compared to other tennis players; you wouldn’t compare yourself to a judo wrestler. It is critical to have clarity on what is important to you and how you characterize your ambition before you evaluate your returns. If you compare your returns to those of other people who are pursuing different ambitions, you risk misjudging your outcomes, either valuing them too low or too high. Similarly, if your ambitions change significantly, you would likely also evaluate your returns across achievement, growth, and well-being differently.

Three Truisms of Return on Ambition

In practice, we find that there are three main ways that the nature of your ambition impacts your returns. First, as your ambitions increase, the bar for fulfillment becomes higher. A bigger ambition requires a higher return, and it becomes more difficult to be satisfied with less.

For example, entrepreneurs who want to build the “next Facebook”— social media platform—will inevitably be disappointed if they are able to sign up only a few million users at launch. For others with a less bold ambition, a few million users might be a very satisfying achievement. We are not suggesting you should lower your aspired Return on Ambition. Rather, we’re cautioning you to be aware that a higher degree of ambition places increased requirements on you to attain certain outcomes.

Also be aware of your unique context. Different individuals will have to expend different levels of effort to reach a given type of ambition, based on their starting point, skills, and work ethic. While we believe everyone has the capacity to stretch greatly, people also need to be realistic. To avoid unnecessary and perpetual frustration, you need to understand the size and type of your ambition relative to your current context. As your ambitions grow, continue to consider the relationship between the size of your ambition and your resulting need to manage the returns even more vigilantly.

Second, as your ambitions grow and you stretch yourself further, it increases the risk of falling short. The more you aim to get out of a given amount of effort, the more stretched your investments in time, energy, and money become. At one extreme, you will have almost no margin for error. If you seek a higher return on your ambition relative to what you are able and willing to put in, you must be sure you can handle a higher risk of falling short.

Third, as you increase your ambition, it becomes increasingly challenging to balance all three elements of your return. The greater the size of your ambition and corresponding expectations across achievement, growth, and well-being, the greater the investment you will need to reach your aspired outcomes. The more you want, the more you need to sacrifice. Ambition can saddle you not only with work commitments but also with personal and social obligations that draw on your resources. Your anticipation of, and fixation on, a greater future can lead to an unsustainably high velocity of commitments and costs. Realistically catalogue the investments you will be required to make in order to realize your ambition and make sure you’re willing and able to put in the necessary resources and effort.

Bringing the Concepts to Life

Here and throughout the book, we will illustrate the key concepts and varieties of ambition with the stories of Bella, Jitesh, and Nora and Alexander.

Take Bella as an example of the first truism—as your ambitions increase, the bar for fulfillment becomes higher.

Bella is not just studying art—she is living it. Her ambition is to use her creations to change people’s perceptions about how humans affect nature. The playfulness with which she once entertained her aspirations turned immediately more serious when a leading art school accepted her as a student. Overnight, the stakes became higher, and with them so did Bella’s ambitions.

Although her bubble of self-confidence burst when she first met all of the school’s other incredibly talented students, she remains determined to stand out among them in her own way. Due to her steadfast focus on her ambition, her world revolves around school. She thinks about art during almost all her waking hours—as if she were breathing it.

She wakes up at night to write down new ideas, so handwritten notes pile up on her bedside table. The time around exams and assignment deadlines leaves her in a state of insomnia. Her high grades comfort her, but only until the next time she is tested. As her ambitions grow, so does her yearning to become better technically and to produce true masterpieces.

How does Bella’s story evolve from here? A person like her could become the next new sensation at an Art Basel exhibition, creating a name that’s known for generations to come. Or she could push herself too hard, to the point where her progress plateaus and some of her blossoming fellow students move past her and into the spotlight. When are her ambitions helping her focus on and pursue her dream of changing people’s perceptions about the natural world through her art? And when are they strangling her fascinating but fragile spirit? Bella is battling with the first of the three truisms regarding ambition: The bigger her ambitions become, the higher she sets the bar for becoming fulfilled.

To illustrate the second truism—as your ambitions grow and you stretch yourself further, it increases the risk of falling short—consider Jitesh.

A well-dressed young urban professio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Bang for Your Buck
• Part One—What is Your Return on Ambition?
• Part Two—What Gets in the Way of Your Return on Ambition?
• Part Three—How Do You Increase Your Return on Ambition?
• Conclusion—The Journey Ahead
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index
• About the Authors