Categories: Articles

Insane Ambition

How often do you feel lazy about your professional development?

There are some moments when you’re probably highly motivated and others when you struggle. It’s like that one time that you decide to ditch the gym and simply can’t find the momentum to get back at it. You’ll blame everything from the kids to busy being busy at work, but deep down you know that you’re simply not motivated to do it. I was listening to an interview with Jerry Seinfeld. He was discussing a conversation he had with Sarah Silverman that never made it to their episode of Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee, in which Silverman was saying that often friends would come up to her and say, "I’m thinking of writing a book…" and before they could finish their sentence, Silverman would shoot back, "it’s never going to happen!" It’s funny enough, but with all comedy comes truth. If you’re going to write a book, you’re going to write a book. We bog our lives down with lists of things we would like to do, but rarely take even the preliminary steps to accomplish our goals. Perhaps, this is why we admire people like Steve Jobs so much.

Finding ambition.

Whenever there is a task in front of me that seems insurmountable or a goal that I’m shying away from, I’ll defer to the following BBC documentary on Steve Jobs titled, Billion Dollar Hippy. You don’t have to love Apple (or Steve Jobs) to be able to appreciate his tenacity, focus and ambition…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.