8/17/2023-Ambition

Ambition? Innate or acquired? YES. Focus on what drives your ambition and you’ll feel the fire building. Everyone is ambitious, it just has to be enough to satisfy and fulfill you.

You have PLENTY of ambition…that much is true. You get after it like the best of ’em.

But the real issue is laser focus. Blinders are mandatory. Not for a few hours a day…all day.

Don’t get caught up in the chatter that ambition breeds selfishness and all that BS….you’re a freakin’ sales sniper; go get it. You have a target and need to be singularly focused.

Forget about comparing yourself to others on your team…this is your game. You may not remember the names of your teammates years from now, but you’ll remember what ambition looked like for you this year in the form of a huge commission check!

How is your ambition of late? Strong? Or weakened because of late summer distractions? Could it be more focused?

Start by appraising the relevance of your ambition triggers: the picture frames on your desk.

Do you still want to buy that red Tesla, or did you already buy it? Take the pic down if the car is in your garage. You need a new pic. You need a new trigger.

What about that vacation you want to take next year? Is the Cliffs of Dover pic the right image that makes you salivate?

Ambition partly feeds on visual cues. Make ’em work for you.

Ambition + how badly do you want it + fearlessness = getting what you want.

Or not.

It’s not a bad thing if you don’t want to be the CRO of your org. Heck, it’s not bad if you don’t know what you want after this role you’re in. And it’s quite normal when you’re ambition wavers and twists in the wind more frequently than you’re comfortable with. (Sales is freakin’ hard.)

This is the point when every ambition expert will urge you to get back to the basics: determine what you want. It’s okay if it changes from time to time…it should. It will.

Do not beat yourself up if you can’t figure out what you want; perhaps striking things from the list of what you don’t want might help. Put everything up for grabs, including material possessions, career tracks and income aspirations, and job functions.

What do you want?

You’ll get your ambition in full gear when you answer that question.

Sure, cheap tricks like framing a picture of a Lamborghini and putting it on your desk may help nudge your ambition along, but as you know, there’s much more to it than that.

If you listen to Stephen Duneier in this TOTALLY WORTH IT 18-minute Ted Talk, you learn that ambition is about making tiny and manageable decisions that can have broad and positive consequences.

But ya gotta commit. You can commit. You can.