Being ambitious saved me. Then I felt guilty about it.

Ambition Saves Me

A few years ago I fell into a state where nothing made sense. Even the game I loved stopped being fun, I had no motivation, and I wasn’t healthy. I don’t want to go back there. What pulled me out was watching videos about making money online. It wasn’t about novelty; it was my zero‑to‑one moment that got me wanting to get up in the morning.

Finding Motivation

I was reading an article by Steven Pressfield from his book Turning Pro. He wrote about a dream he had, and how he woke up thinking: I'm ambitious, I have ambition. That feeling sparked a real change in his life, and I saw the same in my own. I felt guilty at first, wondering who I was to aspire to rise above my brothers and sisters. Many of my family members still have to travel to another city, take buses, or hustle physically to earn a living. When I started working online, my family thought I was just playing on my computer, not that I was actually working.

Pressfield concluded that ambition is not vanity. It is a primal, sacred foundation of our being. To feel ambition and act on it is to embrace the unique calling of our soul. If you are ambitious and do nothing, you are just faking your objectives.

What Ambition Means

To me, ambition is wanting progress. There is no progress without getting better, and improvement comes step by step. Today you take a small step; tomorrow another, and so on. Over time, you become better and move toward a future goal. My goal is money, so I improve myself toward that goal, becoming more professional in my work. Ambition comes first, then the habit that builds on it. You can’t climb the stairs if you don’t see a long‑term goal and aren’t ambitious about it.

Big Goals

I remember reading Tim Ferriss’s The 4‑Hour Workweek (the Portuguese edition). He says we need huge, ambitious goals because they push us closer to achieving them. Ambition without work, however, leaves you an empty shell. Ambition plus training makes you better; ambition without effort makes you fake, like the “gurus” who post AI‑generated photos of expensive cars but feel empty inside. They may make money, but they will still be accountable for that emptiness later.

Current Focus

My ambition now is to get a lot better at serving the clients I already have. By providing more value, I can charge more, make more money, and move to another city to build a life with my girlfriend, we’re planning to get engaged. That is what drives me.

Looking Back

I left out some details earlier. I wasn’t depressed, but I wasn’t mentally well. I didn’t want to get up, didn’t want to eat, and food lost its taste. Wanting to make money helped me want to return to the life I had before and improve it. I was also addicted to Dota 2, the best game to me, but I stopped playing because I realized I wasn’t okay mentally. That low point is behind me now; I’ve never been better.

See you in the next video.