Now that I have a family and am a bit older, I feel much less ambitious. I no longer feel the desire to build a business, or hack on side projects. Granted, a lot of this is because I have less time, but even at work, i feel absolutely no desire to learn new things, or get a promotion.
Is there any way I can revive that ambition again?
Sounds like your job is boring, maybe take a risk?
You won’t be hungry unless you’re hungry which you likely can’t do without putting your family at risk. So maybe focus on the ambition aspect and find something that lights your fire. What’s a challenge or stretch goal you would have fun working towards? Maybe start small and then scale up as you rebuild the muscle.
What helped me is that treat “finding your vision” less like a high-pressure quest, more like playing a game—keep asking yourself honest questions (no pressure), make a bucket list, and use first principles to understand what really matters to you. For me, it took 18 months... This process is a lot like starting a company from scratch.
Keep exploring, stay curious, and don’t be hard on yourself if you don’t have big desires right now. That’s okay too.
To build motivation I spend time actually day-dreaming about success. I am trying to get an emotional involvement with an exact vision of what success would be like. I want to emotionally experience success and develop a yearning for it.
That is what I need to get started on a project. Once I'm started, I find that it is often easy to get so involved in what I'm doing that it becomes hard to stop. Remember those all-nighters when you just couldn't bare to stop. You were in the grove. You were hot!
That's it. Get emotionally involved with success and get in the grove to get it done.
sexyman48•1h ago