I recently watched a man call a two billion shilling target “unambitious,” and I nearly choked on my tea.
I know this man. He talks in billions the way other people talk about the weather: constantly, confidently, and without much bearing on what actually happens outside. He rarely delivers. So naturally I found myself asking: is that ambition, or is that just a very expensive form of small talk?
I have decided it is the second one.
Here is my rule, freshly minted after that tea incident: ambition is not the size of the number you announce at a dinner party. Ambition is the size of the effort you are quietly, unglamorously willing to organise your actual life around.
A man who speaks in billions and delivers in excuses is not ambitious. He is loud. The two get mixed up constantly, usually to the loud man’s benefit and everyone else’s mild irritation.
I, on the other hand, am extremely ambitious. Also annoyingly realistic. And it turns out those two things get along beautifully, once you stop assuming realism is where ambition goes to die. Realism is actually where ambition goes to become believable.
So what does my own ambition look like these days? Fairly specific, as it happens.
I want multiple streams of income, most of which do not require me to personally show up and turn a crank every single day. That is the dream, stated plainly: build income that keeps humming along quietly while I am off doing literally anything else, including sleeping.
This is a slight rebrand from my younger ambition.
I remember turning thirty with startling clarity. I was working at that same American company that had petitioned for my work visa, the one born out of a vacation I never went back to work after. On paper, I had a great deal to be pleased about: I was married, I had a two year old, a good job, a house we had bought together. Any reasonable audit of my life at thirty would have returned a favourable report.
And yet I distinctly remember feeling like I had not done much with my life. I could not even properly name what “further ahead” was supposed to look like. I just had this nagging sense that I should have been earning more, and higher up the corporate ladder than I actually was.
Back then, my whole ambition lived on the corporate ladder. Climb. Get the next title. Earn the next level of “yes, she is allowed in this meeting.” That ambition worked hard for me, and this series has already shown you the receipts: the desk they took away, the department I talked my way back into, the innovation career that eventually followed. Corporate climbing still has a small, stubborn corner office in my heart. I will not pretend otherwise.
But somewhere along the way, a new and louder voice moved in next door: the multiple streams of income voice. And honestly, it is winning more arguments lately. I think it is less about wanting more money and more about wanting fewer people with the power to summon me into a room one day and quietly dismantle my desk.
I have already lived that plot once. I would like the sequel to be optional.
I suspect this is simply what happens to ambition as you get older, if you are paying any attention at all. It does not shrink. It gets specific. In your twenties, ambition is a vague, restless hunger for “more” and “up.” Somewhere past forty, it becomes oddly precise, shaped entirely by the particular lessons your own particular life insisted on teaching you.
My ambition today is quieter than it was at thirty and, frankly, much better armed. I am no longer chasing a title. I am building a small, humming machine of income streams, most of which do not need me standing over them, coffee in hand, personally keeping the lights on.
That is not a smaller ambition. It is a considerably sneakier one.
So the next time someone loudly labels a perfectly respectable number “unambitious” while producing nothing behind it, I will simply smile, sip my tea, and keep building my quiet little empire of streams.
Ambition was never about the size of the claim.
It is about the size of the follow-through.
Mine has receipts.
Come back tomorrow for Day 19: why I have so few friends.
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