Brunette Ambition

I love words. I love oral histories, I love the written word, I love that a picture says a thousand words.

None of this should be surprising, since I’ve found myself in a craft that is all about words. But words are language, and they have their origins, their bridges through centuries and cultures, or they are completely new and made up (hello, amirite). I even once trophied in a school spelling bee, where my trophy had my name wrong. One of my favourite books my parents had growing up was called Word Origins. It had this very beige cover, was thick, and had me wanting to become an etymologist for a phase. Words are the little codes of language, and language is a pathway to communication, understanding and ultimately, hopefully, empathy.

Let’s talk about ambition. If you haven’t already listened to the podcast Archetypes from Meghan (nee Markle, nee The Duchess of Sussex), there's an episode about ambition, featuring her friend Serena Williams (!), it’s a must. They talk about the weaponization of ambition, especially in a gendered lens and context. It resonated with me to the point that in the month since I listened to it there isn’t a day I don’t think about it. Here’s why. Ambition to me is such an interesting word. Ambition or ambitious have a root word of ambi-. I won’t go into “ambi’s” genealogy, but something was bothering me about the word and its use in ambition to mean “a desire to succeed”. Doesn’t that notion of desiring to succeed conjure up ideas of someone moving doggedly in just one direction? Forward. It also feels very self-focused. But “ambi” in all its other word friends means in many cases, both/and. Ambisexual (shortened to bisexual) is to be attracted to both male and female. Ambivalent is equally repelled and attracted, at the same time. Ambidextrous, able to use both hands equally well. Or ambigram, a word or phrase that works backwards and forwards, both directions.

I’ve gone down a bit of a research rabbit hole with this one, and I haven’t yet found where ambition lost one-half of itself, and what that was initially. And I’m struck by this sense that someone being too ambitious makes it seem like they do so at the expense of others, as if it’s a zero-sum game. But life and business aren’t zero-sum, or they don’t need to be (read: Simon Sinek, please!). I’m going to propose a new interpretation of ambitious, to morph it into something we should all be proud to wear as a label: Equally desiring success for oneself, and those around us.

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