Far from being old-fashioned, ambition is more necessary than ever, contrary to what one might believe when reading the phenomena described in a recent column.
Posted at 4:00 p.m.
It’s not a matter of career aspirations changing over time. Or patriarchal values that are fading, as if women were incapable of ambition. It’s even less a question of life balance (a balance that can be achieved while having ambition).
Ambition means giving yourself specific, audacious goals, giving yourself the means to achieve them and devoting the necessary efforts to them. It is this energy that takes you out of your comfort zone and pushes you into action. The secret is to choose the right objectives. Deciding when, how and why to step out of your comfort zone.
Most of us were brought up in a society that valued hard work, effort and personal investment in a trade or profession. With practice and effort, one became better, an expert, or one was simply proud of oneself and of a job well done. And it is by working like this that it ended up relating to the finish line. It was hard work and constant effort that led to a sense of accomplishment, recognition and, yes, reward too.
The pandemic marks a turning point because it is the first disaster in a long time in North America to hit us on such a large scale. We have known several wars for a century, but they have all been fought on other continents. Natural disasters have been experienced in very specific regions. This time the enemy was at our doorstep. At each of our doors. Normal that it pushes us to existential reflections, to the point of sapping our energies and extinguishing hope.
With our comfort and our standard of living, with the ease that technology brings, we can end up wondering if we really want more. If we need more.
Except that we especially need better and different. If we collectively have the feeling that we must not just change the world and that we must save it to survive, that too requires ambition. Lots of ambition.
As a headhunter, I find it worrying that we might be lacking in ambition at the moment. We are at a pivotal phase in our history during which we must adapt and evolve on many levels. Whether we think about sustainable development, the fight against climate change or diversity and inclusion, all these challenges require us to nourish ourselves with ambition every day, both in our professional and personal lives.
This is true for our managers and our decision-makers, who must steer the boat in the right direction with ambition, benevolence and courage. This is true for the young people in our future, whose potential and creative ideas are immense. They will have to redouble their efforts to bring about the changes required. After all, they are the ones who have everything to gain.
It’s not just our careers in our lives, but many of the transformations will happen through our professional lives. A survey by the Regroupement des jeunes chambres de commerce du Québec recently revealed that only 6% of young people aged 16 to 35 admit that their career is important. When you do recruitment as a profession, this data is very worrying. Where will the managers and professionals come from who will enable our society to make the necessary shift by generating progress and prosperity?
Is this the opportunity of the century for the ambitious with a brave heart?