There is no such thing as ambition, what does exist is contentment/personal satisfaction. I have a theory about what determines a person’s ‘ambition’ as regards work they do. I don’t have a great description of it yet, but roughly:
What is referred to as ‘ambition’, how challenging work one does is, is only one part of several factors making up a total personal satisfaction of a person. I refer to total personal satisfaction as their sweet satisfaction zone (SSZ) which exists on a spectrum of satisfaction (SoS). Everyone’s SSZ, to which several factors contribute, determines an individual’s mental state in the long term.
Among the factors affecting where their SSZ lies on the SoS are things like the challenge of the work they do, their relationships with friends, their romantic relationship(s), their status in the hierarchy of their local community etc. Everyone requires different levels of satisfaction from each of these different factors depending on their personality, but each of these factors contribute to the SSZ.
When some people work on what seems ‘ambitious’ to some others, it may just be work that feels sufficiently challenging to them, as they require a huge amount of satisfaction from interesting and high-impact work to contribute to their SSZ. And when a person one thinks to be clever and capable of more works on what one thinks to be below their intellectual ability, it may be that how challenging work they do is doesn’t rank on factors they demand huge amounts of satisfaction from to make their SSZ. The golden handcuffs are in fact personal satisfaction.
So ‘ambition’ doesn’t exist in the sense people like to talk about it. You cannot really be more ambitious or less. It is based on personality.
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My working definition is that ambition is basically neuroticism plus competitiveness, with the former defined as something like 'inability to accept one's self and one's situation uncritically' and the latter as simply 'desire to win'. At the extremes the 2x2 would be
As a low/low, I kind of feel bad for highly ambitious people. Only a few of them actually get to be legends, most burn out or get crushed (being hypercompetitive doesn't neccessarily make you hypercompetent) and being highly neurotic doesn't sound like much fun even for the billionaires. But I can definitely appreciate the benefits of their existence, preferably far away from me.
Hmm. I don't know. I'm not a billionaire and haven't read any of their biographies, so I feel like I could look into whether your model is right or not...
But my first intuition is that there's a way to do the thing without it sucking? Something where you have an enlightened Buddhist growth mindset sort of shape to your analysis of your failings, and all improvement with respect to your goals is euphoric to you. Then you shape your goals such that you are a maximizer rather than a satisficer, or such that you are a satisficer of things you have determined to be great works.
This is the kind of mindset I try to cultivate. But I'm a loser in terms of current attainment of status, money, or great works, so I can't guarantee that there's an actual path there that works for achieving 'greatness'.
More generally, I'm just skeptical that your proposed architecture- high neuroticism, high competitiveness, is the only architecture that leads to greatness... or perhaps that it has to feel bad. I could be convinced that it's the only one that works for humans if all the billionaires pattern match to it... but there should be other architectures that work in principle.
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