“Our entire economy would be well served to acknowledge that there are creativity ebbs and flows, and the market ebbs and flows,” says Satya Doyle Byock, a psychotherapist in Portland, Ore., and author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood. And to embrace the rhythms of my ambition, rather than feel embarrassed or stressed when I’m not inspired or actively ticking off the boxes society foists on me. But I am trying to figure out how to reframe ambition and all that it encompasses-creativity, productivity, discipline-for myself. I certainly don’t want things to go back to “normal,” whatever that was (I don’t think that’s possible post-pandemic). Lately, though, I find myself dissatisfied and restless in a different way. I wasn’t reading as much, I wasn’t discovering new music and art I was, for the first time in my life, “simply vibing,” as I wrote for Fortune. I was still working hard, but I didn’t have any specific goals in mind, personal or professional. This led to a time I’ve come to think of as a creative and spiritual hibernation of sorts. About a year into the pandemic, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied and restless it was hard not to question what I was doing with my life and what I valued and why. Or, at least, they’ve fallen out of love with one definition of it: striving to achieve corporate success for success’s sake.įaced with a crisis like COVID-19, many of us-women and people of color, in particular-started rethinking our relationships to work and finding fulfillment outside of the nine-to-five. Over the past three years, many Americans have fallen out of love with ambition.

The Color of a Leader by Alicia Perry