ambitious women
I’ve spent a lot of time with intelligent and determined women.
What have I noticed? Achieving the vision of ease is ironically arduous. It’s diligence and conscientiousness behind the scenes. Behind glamor is effort. I absorbed early that beauty and competence aren’t heaven-sent but goals to continuously chip away at. Many of us silently believe the promise that if you work hard enough, you could have it all. A well paid career with upward trajectory, loving partner, meticulously trained body, coveted home.
I am piloting my own body, I am stewarding my own soul. That’s what it means to be an Independent Woman Who Knows What She Wants! But in between the literature and ashtanga yoga and weight training and meal prepping and work meetings, I kept scraping up against the simple idea: What does it mean to be ambitious? To me and not to anyone else. What does this mean professionally (becoming a deliberate and seasoned investor) and personally (an ambitious friend, partner, writer)?
There are tradeoffs even if I pretend they don’t exist. We’re often trading externally validated ‘professional success’ and personal freedoms in subtle ways.
Women in the workforce feel this pain acutely. I had two great mentors holding partner-level jobs at prestigious firms speak to me in depth about why they left. One wanted to find their life partner: she spent so long climbing the corporate ladder she barely had time or mental energy to date. The other left after realizing making partner at X company wasn’t actually playing toward her long term vision of life. Both women described it as a painful evolution of changing their priority stack. That’s the hard part, right? You can technically achieve the goals you dreamed of but it may feel hollow when you actually get there. Climbing up the right hill is more important than simply climbing.
I’ve always prided in ‘great striving.’ My parents remind me frequently they’ve never set rigid expectations, I just imposed lofty goals upon myself in a grueling fashion. I think most anxious overachievers are like this: you create a vision and god forbid anything gets in your way of perfection or idealism. The challenge becomes leaving the space for your visions to shape-shift. One’s goals should actually always be changing to adapt to new information. Like art, like writing, life is active and steady revisioning.
I’m beginning to think the ability to patiently configure your own path according to self-knowledge may be one of the most important human traits to nurture.
True confidence is believing in the validity of your own core desires, which also means identifying what you’re willing to sacrifice and bear for certain conditions to yield fruit. When there are competing needs, true prioritization reveals itself. A woman defining her own career path learns this across various dimensions.
When I walk around San Francisco, its blue pallor, its wisteria and lopsided Victorians and the hulking metallic city center, the long, warm, perimeter of horizon, I think of how easy it is to be absorbed into one valorized version of competence. When I return to Asia, I see other modes of traditional success. Wouldn’t it be nice? A stable life, a house in the suburbs. Neither reality feels wholly mine yet. The arc is still being tuned to the right frequency.
Anyways. All this to say: there are many versions of my life that could be beautiful. I have to remember that. My motions and actions don’t have to be labelled as right or wrong or legible, even. What’s more vital is that the dream I’m leaping toward is no one else’s but mine.
I’ll leave you with this gem from John Gardner’s speech, The Road to Self Renewal:
Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.
PS: If you identify yourself as a woman balancing priorities of work and personal life/goals, I would love to hear about your experience in the comments. How have you been navigating it?
PPS: Thank you for reading - if you feel inclined; please like, share and subscribe. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers!
Things I’m reading
I Used to be Charming by Eve Babitz, which is immensely funny, wild, witty, a little chaotic. Reading Babitz to me is like mixing the artistic experimentation of Patti Smith and the lyricism of Joan Didion. Pieces about the glamor of Hollywood, the sultry and intoxicating art scene of the 70s. Writing devoted to beauty for beauty’s sake. I enjoy her casual and breezy tone & lushness and excess of the content. It’s a great deal of fun reading Eve Babitz.
Recollections of my nonexistence, a memoir by Rebecca Solnit about her formation as a writer 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas.
Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu set in late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania as recommended by
whose taste I trust (she also does fantastic book reviews!)Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley by AnnaLee Saxenian about industrial systems that enabled innovation.
I also recently read Abigail by Magda Szabó and loved it - about the naivete and gentle maturation of girlhood, set in World War II ridden Hungary.
Songs of the moment
Tragedy by Dhruv!
I’ve been watching the One Day series (sucker for a romcom I’ll admit it), and the soundtrack is great. I like These Days by Nico and Iceblink Luck by Cocteau Twins
this was beautiful. instant add to my collection of ramblings from around the web on "women and ambition" https://sublime.app/collection/women-and-ambition
I have a hard time reconciling my desire to be a great mother to my beautiful three children and to be very ambitious with my company - Sublime.
It's a problem of time more than anything else. I've always believed that "most people attribute to genius what is time", and both raising children and the creative work I feel called to do demand a lot of time. That balance is always fragile, so I don't have any advice to give here.
What I do know is that it's all hard - it's hard to be a mom and not work. It's hard to work and not have time to raise a family. It's hard to have a career and feel like you didn't devote enough time to your family. But we get to choose our hard.
I also know that the way we think of ambition in the US is very limiting. Those that take the job of building a family seriously are pursuing one of the most ambitious and noble acts. They are building something that outlasts them, whereas most startups and companies disappear within a few years. So it's also a matter of perspective.
So beautiful Nix, and right to the core. Feels like I've had to redefine ambition for myself many times now, my ambitions mutate. It's evolved away from an image or outcome to an internal state or process. It's meaningful to pursue my best, but wanting that to spring from inner necessity - and that's also where the deepest drive is. I love how you're linking it to confidence and validating your core desires, and how you're creating space to define it all for yourself.