Don't Be More Ambitious

Megalomania, done right

“How can I be 100x more ambitious?” is a text I got from a dear friend. My gut made a backflip. I told him I didn’t think ambition was his bottleneck. If anything, he already had too much of it, which is what happens when you spend your days online in a culture built by Silicon Valley. Millions of entrepreneurs believed Naval Ravikant and Paul Graham that success is a matter of levering yourself up with tech and capital. The people who want to save the world call it “impact” instead. Everyone remembers Archimedes’ lever, everyone wants to personally move the world, and everyone forgets the place to stand.

I use words like “bottleneck” because I too have been a member of the leverage cult (not Leverage Research, but the name tells on itself). My reaction was visceral because I recognized the same upside-down thinking that had me following other people’s scripts for years. I would never have guessed my dream of being a founder came from trauma, and that the impostor syndrome was a signal after all. The leverage gospel runs deep, and the second half of the Archimedes line is overdue.

Fake Ambition

When I was larping as a startup founder, we pivoted four times because the market wasn’t big enough or the moat was not durable enough. When we finally landed on something that convinced the VCs to give us $10 million after three years, it was unrecognizable from the initial idea, and I was already burnt out. What we had in common with all the other pivoting founders is working backwards from the outcome. The startup needs to be able to paint a billion-dollar outcome for the venture to be fundable (that’s just how the fund maths works out). As a result, founders search for an idea that ticks all the boxes instead of building what they actually want to build. This is the YC equivalent of studying to the test. The irony is that founders of actual unicorns didn’t get there by wanting to build a unicorn. Most of them also didn’t want to “change the world”, even if they say that in interviews after the fact.

Walking backwards from the result is fake ambition. It’s the cargo cult version that tries to mimic the outward signs of greatness by following a cookie-cutter playbook. I remember what it felt like to be a cargo puppy obsessed with levers. Because my letter to Hogwarts never arrived, I wanted the world to validate the specialness I perceived from the inside. Technology seemed like the biggest social force around, and founding a startup the best available move within tech. I could have learned the lesson while trying to change the world.

The do-gooder version of the cargo puppy wants to become a millionaire in terms of lives changed. They want to draw a direct causal line from their actions to an impressive metric like lives saved, which is why mosquito nets against malaria are overdone now. The lever is capital too, further potentiated by arbitraging cost differences to the developing world. In the WEF global shapers version of the archetype, institutional position also adds leverage. Either way, they are working backwards from the result with their ambition organized as identity. I donated to Against Malaria, even if not anywhere close to competing in the altruist olympics. I carefully selected my carbon indulgence letter, picking a charity that defended strategic regions of the Amazon rather than buying generic offsets. It makes sense to apply effectiveness reasoning to specific decisions. What I didn’t notice at the time was that the donations came from a sense of personal insufficiency. The hidden variable driving all cargo puppies is the vague sense of not good enough. We think backwards from the outcome because the levers are really prostheses.

Scale Matters

A particularly bold gut bacterium decided to address the Excess Glucose Crisis. Meanwhile you finish your Coke thinking about Methane Release from the Boreal Permafrost.

The bacterium can’t see the system it’s trying to influence, and even if it could, it couldn’t begin to fathom its complexity. You’re in the same situation when it comes to global issues like climate change. Planning at civilizational scale as a single person is a category error.

Hyperobjects can’t be personal projects.

A single human doesn’t have the processing power to model them or the affordances to act on them. You’ll be dead before the feedback loop closes. A puppy barking at a cargo ship as if that could turn it from the port.

Suppose you tried anyway. In order to personally counter civilizational collapse, you’d need a pretty big lever. Such a gargantuan lever that you would have to devote your entire life to amassing that much power. As a power maxxer, you would not have time to develop the wisdom that would be required to wield such power. Instead, you would have narrowed your life into a single vector, probably pointing in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter which version of the script you are running; capitalists and activists converge at the same vanishing point. I have come to immediately distrust anyone who frames their existence in terms of a “life mission”.

Most people don’t have enough conviction or trauma to actually try becoming Elon Musk. I didn’t want to make the sacrifices necessary for success in the founder track. What burned me out was realizing how much more obsessive focus would have been needed. In that sense, the imposter syndrome was correct. Ambition that is slightly beyond your reach is motivating but make that gap orders of magnitude and it becomes so crushing it’s dissociative. The cargo puppy gets to chase a bigger stick forever because the ambition was never reachable. That’s by design, because failing at a heroic mission is cooler than succeeding in an ordinary life. And less risky, ironically. You can keep pretending to want to save the world for the rest of your life without ever having to find out what you are capable of.

None of this means that you shouldn’t have ambitions and plans or want a lever. The question is where you would stand if you got one.

Ambition scales with Agency

I feel more ambitious now than I ever felt as a founder. I’m immersed in a cloud of ambition, enticing in many directions at once, instead of a target I march towards.

A few years ago I wrote an essay that framed my favorite thinkers as all building pieces of an emerging metamodern world religion without coordinating. I was DJing with ideas, highlighting resonances and working transitions between them. Hanzi Freinacht, who lit me up years prior, republished it on his blog. That essay was the conversation starter that led to my friendship with fellow octopus lover Stephen. He later told me that the piece had been discussed at the foundation of Rob Burbea, a meditation teacher whose work had reshaped the way I see the world. The piece had a tiny readership, the kind a cargo puppy would dismiss as irrelevant. But I went from being a consumer of ideas into relationships with people I admired in a way I couldn’t have planned.

The cargo puppy pushes down a narrow vector with willpower. Its ambition constitutes its identity (“I am a founder”), a constant marketing campaign against a felt sense of lack. In contrast, dividual ambition feels like natural unfolding, a gentle pull of curiosity and desire. I’m surprised, years on, that I still want to write the next essay.

The cloud of ambition opens up into schemes that can’t fit inside a single life: I want to live in a chosen tribe where care and play are abundant, but we want to abolish suffering. Dividual ambition allows for plans no single person could execute, without needing profit capture or metrics to hold them together. We all win if we get there, and it doesn’t matter much who gets how much of the credit.

Megalomania done right is a fractal.

Ambition grows with the size of the group and the time horizon it identifies with. As a squad, we can build a porous company for continuous learning that lasts decades. The intersecting movements of cypherpunks and governance nerds can grow new currencies and network nations over centuries. As humanity, we can attempt the abolition of suffering over millennia. Each level of the fractal carries more agency than the one below it. Agency pulls ambition forward, and ambition pulls you to the next level. Dividual ambition is the world’s only perpetual motion machine.

The level I most identify with is the Open Conspiracy of Dreamers and Doers. Most of the people who matter to me are in it. It is the loosely connected cabal of feral free agents across many subcultures and undercover cells inside institutions who are actively working towards an uplifting vision of the future. We recognize each other by playing infinite games and by the glimmer in the eye.

We meet in person too. My friend Simon hosts a yearly gathering called Treeweek for about fifty weirdos, where I have deepened old friendships and new ones started. The fruits of those relationships percolate out through the rest of the web as increased emotional capacity, as business adventures and art projects. None of this can be traced to a single decision or attributed to a single person. Like a tree in a forest, an ambitious life serves uncountable purposes across scales. The cargo puppy cuts the tree down to make a plank to lift a specific weight.

You are a limb of the world, not the captain of your contribution. The world can move you in return.

100x Agency

The world moved me to write this piece with the text of my friend. Here is how I wish I had answered it:

“We are already 100x more ambitious, just not in a way that is legible to the cargo cult of leverage.”

The false dichotomy of ambition versus humility dissolves once we look beyond individualism. Ambition grows naturally as we zoom out the fractal, because ambition is in relationship with agency, and we can achieve much more as collectives than as individuals.

It’s also true that agency is not uniformly distributed. Even though I wouldn’t call us “thoughtful, committed citizens,” we are a small group that is changing the world. If you are part of the Open Conspiracy, life wants to move through you to make stuff happen.

Look around. Where are you standing, and who’s next to you? Is this really your spot?

How would you know?

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It’s an open conspiracy, but you can still pay me to onboard you

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Ink Trails:

• Agency pulls ambition pulls agency

• The cargo puppy aims too narrowly

• The Open Conspiracy is already playing New Game+