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We have all had ambitions. We grow up with them, and in order to move our lives and businesses forward we need to keep them.
Of course I don’t mean that we need to keep the same ambitions. As we grow older we tend to recognise our particular skills and deficiencies and adjust our ideas to take these into account.
I was fairly conventional when I was a child in wanting to be either an engine driver or an astronaut. Indeed I fully expected to be going to the moon well into my teens, and might have got there as a tourist years ago if the US space program had not lost its way then as it has once again. Richard Branson might help me out yet. Still, some are more focussed than I was. I remember that my best friend when I was nine or ten wanted to be chartered accountant. I don’t think he ever qualified as one, though I believe he is a successful financial journalist. Money must have interested him in one way or another all these years.
We need one or more ambitions throughout our working lives simply as motivation. Otherwise we will simply make the old mistake of doing the same thing; I will avoid the cliché. If we do not try to change, we will not get better and our businesses will not get better.
Of course it is not sensible to be unrealistic. I will never be an astronaut, more’s the pity, and I will never travel the galaxy in a star ship, unless of course I am abducted by aliens, and that would be a poor ambition. I do need a marketing plan and I do need to implement it and ask my network on a professional basis how I can grow my business further and go to the next level.
Ambition is no bad thing even when we get old. Maybe I will join the one-hundred-year-old parachute jumpers one day, but for now, let me have a successful growing business to pay for my eventual retirement and of course the parachute school in a few decades time.
© Jon Stow 2010
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Jon, I love this post 🙂
I also wanted to be an astronaut, but my dream was thwarted by parents who worrying about the first Gulf war in the 90’s refused to let me join the RAF.
Recently, I have discovered there is something that I want, and I want it so much that it has focused me. Yesterday I had lunch with a mutual friend of ours and he had an almost identical idea for a business that I had.
Normally I would have said nothing, but it’s a really good idea, so we become a joint venture – to achieve my ambition, I could not let go of the concept and walk away like I normally do, I fought my case and I feel it’s stronger for having the other person as part of the team to realise this goal.
Regaining my motivation has been a big thing for me 🙂
Sarah
Thank you, Sarah. I really do believe we all need something to aim for. I wish you luck in achieving your new ambition. I have one too which is not so different from one I had in my mid-teens, and is achievable with persistence and application.