Make rest a necessity, not a goal. – Jim Rohn

One of the best times that I felt about my personal productivity is when I was dead broke, working two dead end jobs that didn’t pay a lot of money. I was crawling my way out of a very hard financial setback. One of my jobs was an 11-7 overnight front desk hotel job where mainly checking people into the hotel. During the day i was working an 8-4 call center so as you can imagine I was walking around like a zombie. Fortunately, the two jobs were just down the street from each other so I’d shower at the hotel, grab a coffee with enough sugar to put me in a diabetic coma and speed walk to my second job with just enough time to punch in on time.

I remember how I felt the first time that I got two check on the same day. While nearly all of this money was going towards bills, seeing those two checks made me feel like a man who was taking care of his business as those checks represented me taking an all-out effort to get back on track in life.

Sometimes when you’re ambitious it comes as a result of being in a very bad place like the one that i was in where you’re just trying to get some breathing room away from a present level of discomfort and then at other times it may come from a hunch or a motivating idea or a vision that you have for a brighter future.

Even when things are actually going pretty solid in your life, I think there needs to be a period of time where you take a remarkable all-out effort towards something idea or goal. You see the thing with the ambition is that it’s a fuel that can run out and ambition is not always around the state unless you’ve been inclined to have that sort of a personality trait.

It’s just like when you go to the gym at the start of a new year, you might be there almost every day faithfully because you have this vision in your head of how you want to look and feel, but after say two weeks, you may start slowing down. However, even if you do slow down – you can’t you remember how hard you work during those couple of weeks?

You remember getting up out of a comfortable bed even when you didn’t feel like it, debating if you looking out the window at the inclement, beginning to make excuses as to why you’ll put it off for a day and yet, you decided to get out the house and make your way to the gym. After every workout, you’d look in the mirror to see if you had more muscle definition and a flatter stomach, and at the next workout, you’d push your strength to see if you can push and pull more than the last time. You were being ambitious! Even when you’re routine slipped away, you still recall how it felt and what it took to get some incremental results.

That’s part of the beauty of ambition – even if you put forth effort in shorter spurts you can see what you’re capable of when you really put your mind to something for a small amount of time. Even if you don’t keep the pace consistently, ambition keeps an idea in front of us to pursue an idea with a degree of eagerness that we may not normally experience, furthermore – it’s not always necessary to even achieve a certain goal through our ambition.

One of the main benefits of ambition s that it gets you busy, it gets you active it gets you engaged. It puts you in the state of mind towards actually being productive. Sometimes you just need to get out of a slump and being ambitious helps you to do just that.

Now of course, we want to make sure that our ambitions aren’t infringing upon the lives of other people or that they’re even destructive to ourselves. In deciding to be ambitious, it should be something that moves us to see a change or to make progress.

I remember the first car that I bought, a nearly 20 year old piece of crap Buick LeSabre that I spent less than $1000 for. Even though it didn’t last me any good length of time, and was basically a lemon, I’ll never forget how mentally locked in I was when I decided to find the money to get the car.

I was freezing my ass off on a harsh Buffalo Winter morning, it must’ve been a single digit temperature day. I was standing at the bus stop watching cars pass me by being surrounded by dirty snow and ice and saying to myself out loud: “I don’t care what I have to do, I’m getting a car in the next month!”

Right there on the spot I made the pledge that i was going to get a car because I had reached the point of no longer accepting my uncomfortable situation. I recall that I didn’t have the money at the time to buy a car, but what’s even bigger perhaps is that I don’t actually remember what I did to raise the money to get the car in the time frame that I pledged to myself. What’s important about this moment is that my ambition drove me to achieving a very specific outcome where I knew within my spirit that I wasn’t going to turn away from my decision to do what it took to get the car.

Some situations in life call for us to reach the point of no return where we you no longer tolerate a specific situation: whether it be treatment from a certain person in your life, a circumstance that is rotting your quality of life away, a habit that is counterintuitive to where you want to go, or when you’re just sick and tired of being sick and tired of your talents and ideas going to waste because you know that you’re much better than what you’ve been demonstrating. What’s one big thing

that you could do for yourself within the next 12 months – a milestone accomplishment that you’d like to look back on of your life’s resume? Think of the cumulative result of how many things you’d have to be proud of yourself over after 5 years in a row of hitting one big ticket item each year.

Written By: Waymon Brown. Creator of theesquireproject.com. Email info@theesquireproject.com