018 | How ambitious people waste their lives.

becoming someone in a time when you could be anyone.

ONE

Ambitious people find clever ways of wasting pieces of their own life, all while appearing productive.

You might be the optimizer type: the one who runs through their morning routine with robotic consistency. Your sleep, diet, and supplements are meticulously tracked without fail. You have a stack of self-help books on your bookshelf, and you’ve devoured all of them. Multiple times. At some point, your preparation became the activity, not the means toward something greater.

Perhaps you’re more of the dabbler type. You’ve developed three detailed business ideas in two years, wrote a weekly newsletter that dropped after the first month, and enrolled in a Coursera class you never finished. You begin each project with conviction and effort, just to shelve it for the next.

Most often, you’re a waiter. You know what you want and you’ve known it for years, but you’re looking for the perfect conditions before you pounce on it. You’re waiting - wishing - for the right point in time to strike, the right partner to enter your life, some arbitrary dollar amount to land in the savings account.

You’ve waited so long it’s nearly become a personality trait.

Whatever example fits you, you want something great out of your life... You just don’t know what.

It feels like there’s something you haven’t figured out yet. Like something needs to happen to you before you commit and go all-in.

But the only way to begin figuring it out is to commit first.

TWO

Indecision feels neutral, almost by definition. We fail to realize that indecision is still a decision. While it isn’t a permanent one (until it is), each day spent in the world of endless options is one less day spent in commitment.

What feels like a phase of vigilance creates a phase of hoarding. Every option unpicked is a potential version of yourself you’re keeping around, but each one is collecting dust on the basement floor. You could be a founder, you could be a parent, you could be a teacher or coach, or a hundred other things.

We can be anything but not everything, especially in the modern age.

Your great-grandparents had a handful of career paths and a hometown that anchored them. Many of you reading have infinite options and could live almost anywhere.

The optionality feels like a gift, but it’s really just another box to stow away. Committing to anything becomes terrifying, and leaves us feeling like a better life was left on the table. Indecision makes us feel like we have every possible life, for the sole reason that we could potentially have any of them.

Hoarding feels like abundance from the inside.

THREE

For most people, narrowing their options down to a single focus tempts them to ask, “what do I want most?”

They ask the question for years, never fully articulating a clear answer. They journaled about it, asked their therapist, and dwelled on it at the end of long Friday nights that slowly became mornings.

If this is you, consider that this question isn’t worth answering in the first place… and maybe it can’t be. Everyone wants something, usually many things at once. Wanting is free. The life built on wants is a life of breadth and no depth; our wants change with the seasons, with age, with new problems and new opportunities.

A simple reframe flips our wanting on its head.

“What am I willing to suffer for?

What am I willing to lose in the process?”

There is no way around this. Anything worth having requires some level of suffering or loss to obtain it. If it didn’t, we’d all have it. You can start with an answer, even a vague, incomplete one, and dial it in as you learn and reassess.

Taking action on your answer is what separates the life you build from one you daydream about.

This doesn’t mean your problems will dissolve. You’ll always have problems, except now they’re just upgraded ones. The founder you admire, the parent you model after, the athlete or actress you always wanted to emulate, they all have their own problems. However, through getting clear on their aspirations, they have the luxury of choosing their problems, rather than being dealt a random hand.

In short, pick a path you’ll be proud you suffered for.

FOUR

If you call yourself ambitious, it’s likely that you prefer to be certain before you commit. You wait for some level of confidence before commitment. The order is backwards: you can’t see the end of the path before walking it. The path has no trailhead- you find it by wandering into an untrodden forest and looking back at your footprints.

The path is created through the act of walking it, not before.

Clarity is only found in the middle of the forest.

If you don’t know what’s worth pursuing, exploration is the right move. This looks different for everyone. It’s working jobs across multiple industries to see where you fit, dating different people before knowing who to marry, touring apartments before signing a lease, or even trying multiple hobbies before honing one into a craft.

But exploration has a shelf life of its own. The inverse problem can be created by exploring forever. It starts as a phase and becomes a lifestyle (see: ‘the dabbler’). A lifetime spent exploring without commitment, vast breadth with no depth, just becomes another form of hiding. After exploring, the only remaining move is to pick the strongest option with the knowledge you have, and double down.

Daunting as it sounds, the right path can only be found in hindsight.

FIVE

The cost of commitment isn’t just suffering, but the mourning of all the maybe-lives you’ll never live. Every choice has an opportunity cost: all the choices you could have picked, but didn’t. It feels dismal at first, but it’s important to remember that our finite time is what makes our choices feel meaningful.

The magic comes from the sacrifice, the removal of alternatives. Even the word itself, “decide”, derives from the Latin root caedere, meaning, “to kill” or “cut off”- the same suffix as pesticide or homicide.

Every decision will offer its own costs and rewards. Early in life, the things we work toward are “freedom to” decisions: freedom to begin adulthood and live the way we choose, freedom to pursue a career in something we’re interested in, freedom to afford the luxuries of a good life. Later on, we work toward “freedom from” decisions: freedom from the 9-5, freedom from financial stress, freedom from doing things we don’t want to do.

Indecision gives you nothing but the freedom of possibility, but even this freedom is fleeting.

Another strong razor of choice-making is the “regret-minimization framework”. It sounds a bit academic upfront, but it’s a simple, forward-thinking strategy that aims for building an optimal life.

When faced with a fork in the road, imagine yourself at 80 years old, looking back. Which path would you most regret not taking? The regret of action usually fades, but the regret of inaction often compounds.

Your older, wiser self has already made the call…it’s up to current-you to listen.

SIX

You might believe you’re afraid of making the wrong choice, but much of our fear comes from the idea of choosing at all. As long as your life remains unchosen, you can cling to the belief that you could’ve been anything: the founder, the author, the athlete, the grandparent, the leader.

All of it, in potential only.

Refusing to commit protects the fantasy that you could’ve been extraordinary at any one thing IF ONLY you had chosen it. The moment you pick, the fantasy ends. You find out what you’re actually made of, not what you could have been in theory.

The thought itself can be terrifying: the heartless execution of every possible version of yourself, except one.

The fear brings hesitation, and you revert to old habits. You optimize, dabble, wait, confusing inaction for patience.

The years fall away so the ‘maybe-lives’ can stay.

Until you realize the cost of indecision wasn’t a delayed start. It was your life itself.

You keep your options open and you let them all expire, one by one. A wasted life was never the by-product of a “slightly-less-optimal” decision, but the failure to make a decision at all.

SEVEN

I was a waiter in my own life for longer than I’d like to admit. All through college I wanted to start a business in something- at least as a side gig. In the meantime, I journaled for three years straight (since October 2022) before I ever shared a word of it. I was deferring projects day after day before realizing there would be no perfect moment to start.

What cracked the pattern was betting the house on something I was willing to suffer for, with no way to wriggle out of it. Launching my business with a few hundred bucks, zero contacts, no formal business knowledge, and a stubborn delusion that I’ll figure it out as I go. I’m still going and I don’t know how it ends, but I know I’d rather find out myself than be left wondering.

The theme that each of my essays seem to point back to is the brevity of life, and how we only have one to live. And we can’t fully grasp what makes it worth living if we aren’t willing to take a chance.

Jean-Paul Sartre phrased it better than I ever could:

“I have led a toothless life. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on- and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.”

Be sure to leave some bite marks.

—KPG