Ambition Isn’t the Problem—Your Relationship With It Might Be 

Imagine grinding so hard in your career to the point that you get a call from your doctor saying that you are at risk of organ failure at just 28 years old. That is Amina AlTai’s story. From 80-hour work weeks and shiny job titles, she experienced hustle culture firsthand and fought her way back from extreme burnout. Now, as an executive coach and author of The Ambition Trap, AlTai shares the wake-up call that helped her redefine what ambition is. 

AlTai recently joined Les Alfred, host of She’s So Lucky, to discuss why fulfillment isn’t a luxury but a necessity. She shared the difference between chasing success to prove your worth versus possessing a type of ambition that aligns with your values and desires. AlTai and Alfred also unpack performative ambition, signs you are caught in the ambition trap, and how to find true purpose. If you have been caught on the hamster wheel of performance, here is your permission to want more, but for the right reasons.

A rude awakening to the pitfalls of hustle culture

At 28 years old, AlTai was busy advancing in her lucrative marketing career. “I had one of those great, shiny-on-paper lives where I had the title and all of the accolades,” she explains. “I was running this marketing firm and taking care of everyone else but myself.”

AlTai admits that, as the child of immigrants, she leaned into the narrative of keeping her head down, working hard, being the first one in and the last one out, and not making waves. So, when she started to feel sick, she initially brushed it off. After seeing seven or eight doctors, AlTai finally found a trusted doctor. This is the same doctor who gave her the earth-shattering news that she was days away from multiple organ failure. “That was the moment that I realized that I had to change my whole life,” she recalls. “Because my relationship to work, success, and ambition was clearly distorted.”

Signs you are stuck in the “ambition trap”

AlTai says that too often, people of color, women, people with disabilities, and people in the LGBTQIA+ community have a tenuous relationship with ambition. This is because of our lived experiences. 

AlTai describes two types of ambition—painful ambition and purposeful ambition. “At the root of it, I think purposeful ambition is neutral and natural,” she says. “It’s simply a desire for more life and a wish to unfold, but we live in a world that makes it right for some people and wrong for others.” 

Painful ambition, on the other hand, is driven by core wounds like rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice. AlTai says as a result of those wounds, you wear a corresponding mask. So if you have dealt with a rejection wound, you wear the mask of avoidance. If you have a betrayal wound, the mask you wear is control. “When our ambition is built upon that, it can be a house of cards if we have no awareness of that,” she says.

The ambition trap and finding purpose in hustle culture

For AlTai, healing her relationship with ambition was not linear. After seeing her doctor, she went on a health journey—what she calls her Eat, Pray, Love year. AlTai exercised, tried career coaching, experimented with somatic therapy, and studied mindfulness. 

After her personal development and wellness journey, AlTai decided that she wanted to help other people do the same. “It was really messy, and it took years,” she says. “And I wrestled with the idea of teaching it to others because I think the word ‘coach’ is so loaded for so many of us.”

While there are so many great tools and teachers in the space, AlTai is honest about coaching and personal development being extremely unregulated. Her solution is to take your time when choosing a coach. “I will take my time to weigh and measure if it’s the right person for me,” she explains. “If I feel like a lot of pressure, I am not going toward it. I use my intuition deeply with that.”

AlTai struggled with the “coach” title early on. “But what I realize is that every space or industry has a spectrum of humans; there are ones doing things with deep integrity, and there are ones operating in the shadows,” she says. “It’s up to us to decide who we want to align ourselves with.”

How to connect with purpose and aligned goals

The question, “What is my purpose?” can feel overwhelming and weighty. Don’t let it send you into an existential crisis. AlTai defines purpose as “the best that is within you at any given moment.”

Instead of thinking of your purpose as a North Star, AlTai encourages you to reimagine it as a constellation of things. “Purpose feels so heavy because we feel like we have to land this thing for a lifetime,” she explains. “We put so much pressure on ourselves to find this singular thing, but that’s not practical. Instead, purpose should always be evolving and contain a multitude of things.”

Read Next

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• Dr. Tiffany Moon on When High Achievement Leads to Burnout