Don't Be a Dreamer. Be Ambitious.

Ambitious people often make the mistake of believing that everyone possesses the same determination as they do.

It’s partly why they say that great players make terrible coaches. Their level of expectation far exceeds the willingness of the average player, even in elite leagues.

I see myself as an ambitious individual who is willing to take risks and is internally motivated to go after new challenges. I don’t need my hand held or reminders to apply myself, and hurdles don’t cause me to quit. They just force me to find another way around them.

Recently, my wife told me about someone in her life who really wants a promotion at their job. As the good person she is, my wife went into mentor mode.

However, every time she would tell me about this individual, she would find herself getting more frustrated with this individual for not taking advantage of opportunities and lacking the motivation to better themselves. Her role as a mentor quickly devolved into being the emotional support and advice giver to a person who simply lacks the internal fire to light the world ablaze.

She was experiencing what a lot of ambitious people run into when personally invested in helping someone on their professional rise: You can’t teach hard work.

In my experience, professional accomplishments are the sum of the little things you do on your own. They’re not handed to you in some sort of career layup. If someone expresses interest in working with me, I follow up with them. When writing for publications, I always meet my deadlines. I’m well aware of the negative impact on my editors and therefore my reputation if I don’t.

These are small but important habits that ambitious people develop instinctively. They’re obsessed with the journey, not just their end goal. They aren’t sitting around waiting for an external source of motivation.

The dreamers are people who want that promotion or new career opportunity, but are too infatuated with the end goal to fall in love with the journey itself.

Ambitious people are satisfied when they reach a goal because it reflects how far they’ve come. Dreamers would be satisfied with succeeding by osmosis. Think of someone who likes the sound of being a multi-millionaire, but never takes the time to understand how someone could actually end up in that position. My wife was dealing with a “dreamer” who could only see the fancy title and higher pay, not the work it would take to get there.

My wife is a wonderful person who genuinely wanted to help, but she mistook this person’s need to verbalize their dream state for an actual request for help. Misidentifying what kind of person she was dealing with led to frustration over their inability to take sound advice, transform it into action, and make real progress.

I’ve had the same experience, spending hours telling someone step by step how to improve themselves as it goes in one ear and out the other. You can connect them to the right people, provide a detailed plan, and hold their hand down the right path, but they won’t be any closer to turning their dreams into reality.

Ambitious people should ask themselves this question: Did anyone do this for you?

For all the effort you put into this person, did a single person do half as much for you?

Of course not. We didn’t need it. While helping someone else we might think, “I wish someone had done this for me,” but the reason we found success was because they didn’t.

Strife teaches you far more about success than comfort. Even if a dreamer does stand a chance, our need to babysit their progress handicaps them when we should be letting them develop career calluses.

So, my suggestion: Only help people who’ve already demonstrated that they’re moving toward their goals. Offer helpful tips rather than detailed instructions. But most importantly, let them suffer their way to the winner’s circle. They’ll appreciate it more when they land there.

If they are obsessed with the end goal rather than the journey, you’re likely dealing with a dreamer who refuses to wake up.