A quieter kind of ambition
Wanting less on purpose, without pretending that wanting nothing is a personality.
3 min read
At a book festival in 2025 someone asked me, kindly, what my ambitions were, and I said I wanted to still be doing this in 2036. There was a pause of the kind that tells you an answer has landed wrong, and then they said: no, but what do you actually want?
I have thought about that pause for a year. They were not being rude. They were applying a definition of ambition that I had also held for most of my thirties, and under that definition my answer was a non-answer.
The word has been ruined
Ambition now means scale and speed. More readers, bigger rooms, a shorter interval between now and the thing. Under that definition, wanting to be doing the same work in eleven years is not an ambition at all: it is an absence of one, dressed up.
But the two words are doing different jobs. Wanting less is not the same as wanting nothing, and the useful move is not to shrink the wanting. It is to change what the wanting is measured against.
Making the ambition smaller and the timescale much longer is not modesty. It is a bet that compounding beats intensity, and it is a bet you can lose.
Small and long, not big and fast
The letter goes to about four thousand eight hundred people. I have never once tried to increase that number, and I could: there are eleven things I know would work and I have watched other people do all of them. What stops me is that every one of them would change what the letter is for.
Whereas the timescale is where I am genuinely greedy. I want eleven more years of it. I want the archive to be long enough that somebody can read backwards through it and watch a person change their mind. That is an enormous ambition and it happens to require almost nothing of me this week except turning up.
The version of this essay I deleted
Three people who do this well
- Ines Costa, who has photographed the same stretch of river monthly since 2015 and has one photograph she likes. Year two was boring, and year two is where everyone stops.
- Nadia Ferrant, who lays hedges for a landscape she will not see, and who described herself as halfway through someone else's job.
- Ellen Marsh, nineteen years on one building, who does not expect anyone to notice a single stone she has cut.
None of the three would describe themselves as ambitious. All three are doing something far more difficult than the thing the word usually points at.
The arithmetic of a decade
Two hours on a Tuesday is a hundred hours a year, which is nothing. Over eleven years it is eleven hundred hours, which is a body of work. The arithmetic is trivial and the doing of it is not, because the arithmetic only pays out if you are still there in year nine, and year nine is unglamorous by construction.
This is the part the festival questioner and I actually disagreed about. They heard "eleven years" as a low ceiling. I meant it as a very high one. Eleven years of anything, done deliberately, is more than most careers contain.
What I want by 2036
The same letter, roughly the same size, with eleven more years in the archive. Two more books, if they insist on existing. A podcast that has run long enough that guests arrive already knowing the one question. And the same desk, which I now understand I am not building but keeping.
If someone asks me at a festival in 2036 what my ambitions are, I would like to give the identical answer, and for the pause to be shorter.
