A Follow Up on Ambition

Is it good to be ambitous?, Twitter vs. General Public & America's Drinking Problem

Cut glass chandelier. Perry, of Bond Street.

🧠 Curiosity

In my last post, I wrote about a framework to define ambition. Today, I want to take a step backwards and ask: “Should you want to be ambitious in the first place?”

The mainstream consensus certainly is ‘yes’. ‘Ambitious’ is an adjective that most people desire to label themselves with. At least no-one wants be seen as unambitious.

Nevertheless, there are also some good reasons to believe that there is a too much of ambition and that being ambitious has some downsides as well.

Some thoughts on this:

Pro Ambition:

• High Ambition -> higher education, income & status
  This link is not only (at least somewhat) straightforward but also backed up by quite some scientific evidence (for example this paper here, here or here). I mean, you could argue that it is questionable whether everyone wants more education, income and status. However, at least based on my personal experiences I claim that only very few people would say ‘no’ if you’d offer them a doctor title, more money and more social media followers ‘for free’ (let me know if you have made different observations - would be interested to hear about them).

• Ambitious people dream big & build
  We need big dreams and bold moves to push our society a step forward. And in the end, it’s the ambitious people, the crazy ones who dare to dream big. In many ways ambition is a driver for change - just think of some of the well-known entrepreneurs out there. Jeff Bezos who is now planning to fly to space or the (in)famous Elon Musk. A lot of their innovations are certainly (at least partially) fueled by ambition and my guess would be that humanity would be much slower to make progress on basically everything if we don’t have dreamers like them.

Contra Ambition:

• Ambition might come at the expense of social bonds & hinders collaboration
  Research by psychologist Tim Kasser (who also authored a book called “The High Price of Materialism”) suggests that materialistic values such as money, possessions and social status lead to poorer interpersonal relationships. This makes it also harder for ambitious people to collaborate with others - at least if the the thing that fuels their ambition is a scarce resource. E.g. there is only a limited ‘amount of status’ out there - if everyone has a high status, in fact no-one has one. Thus, ambitious people need to compete for it with others.

• Ambitious people are less satisfied
  A study amongst psychology graduates found, that those with high ambitions were objectively more successful a few years down the road but were less satisfied with their professional development. Another study only found a very weak link of ambition to well-being and a negative correlation with longevity. So, if all you want is to live a happy life, maybe you should become less ambitious?

What’s your opinion? Do you have any arguments in mind which are missing here?

📉 Curves

Twitter Users Differ from the General Public Quite a Bit

Why it matters: These days Twitter is frequently used as a source of real-time information. Further, Twitter data is often taken as a starting point for studies in the social sciences that aim to identify trends as e.g. the public sentiment towards COVID-19. While these findings and impressions are certainly interesting, it’s important to keep in mind that the Twitter universe is not representative for general society (I would guess this holds even more true for European countries than in the U.S.).

Source: Pew Research Center

📚 Curation

• America has a drinking problem
  An article about the history and status quo of the American drinking culture that manages to shed lights on both, the positive and negative aspects of alcohol consumption

  This research might also shed light on another mystery: why, in a number of large-scale surveys, people who drink lightly or moderately are happier and psychologically healthier than those who abstain. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist, examined this question directly in a large study of British adults and their drinking habits. He reports that those who regularly visit pubs are happier and more fulfilled than those who don’t—not because they drink, but because they have more friends. And he demonstrates that it’s typically the pub-going that leads to more friends, rather than the other way around. Social drinking, too, can cause problems, of course—and set people on a path to alcohol-use disorder.

• The Cooperation Economy
  Interesting follow up on a post I shared last time - this article puts on paper what I think most people who are somehow engaged in the tech ecosystem already witness on a daily basis

  That caveat out of the way, I think the Cooperation Economy, the lightweight convergence of people with differentiated and complementary skill sets around a goal, is here to stay, and isn’t just for influencers. 
  Participation in the Cooperation Economy requires only something with which individuals come pre-loaded: differentiation. Understand what you’re uniquely good at, how you want to play the Game, and then join forces with people with shared goals and complementary skills.
  The Cooperation Economy is an optimistic vision for the future. It’s community at Great Online Game scale, with real financial upside. More liquid co-ops for the internet. Just because we can do more on our own doesn’t mean that we should. 

• The Tyranny of the Faceless Other
  A reminder of how important it is to know your audience/target group/customers when creating basically anything
  
  When I want to make a video, I start thinking about all the possible videos I could make and all the reasons why someone wouldn’t want to see it. When I come up with ideas for coding projects to make, they’re usually for a large group of people with loads of features.
  I think all these problems have their root in the same issue- creating for an imaginary group of people. You don’t know this crowd of people, and at best, have a vague idea of who they are and what they want. I call this group of people ‘the Faceless Other’.

✨ Curios

• A bicycle company ran a couple of tests and found out that actually wide tires are not at all slower than slower than thinner ones - this just seems to be a widely believed myth

• A twitter feed collection of fascinating charts

• The 5 coolest trends in urbanism (spoiler: Vienna got a few mentions in this article)