---
date: 2026-11-03 10:34
description: Ambition for people who don’t really want much
tags: Life
---
# Be More Ambitious
I am one of the laziest people I know. I don’t really want much in life. I would be so much happier just rotting on the couch and watching TV all day. Okay, I am joking about that (I think). I am lazy, and I don’t really wake up wanting anything, but looking back I have almost always been up to some shenanigans. Again, not because I want anything in particular or because I want to execute and achieve my grand vision, but because doing something is better than doing nothing. A lot of my projects are like “Wouldn’t that be cool?” “Wait, is that even possible?” “Why not?”
Maybe being more ambitious means breaking the cyclic nature of life and stepping out of your comfort zone. Trying something new. Trying something different. Trying something you were always scared of doing because you didn’t want to fail at something. What you define as ambition is completely up to you. You don’t have to shoot for the moon; you just need to do something that you didn’t before, or didn’t think was possible before. I remember this advice in chess: when a piece is moved, you should look at the lines that were not possible before. Perhaps, this applies to life too.
I used to have a whole backlog of silly ideas that I couldn’t even attempt before. Now, I can spin up an agent on my computer from my phone by asking Siri to text this iMessage agent completely hands-free while driving, and have initial results ready before I even reach my destination. How cool and cyberpunk is that? Just like Jevons’ paradox though, I didn’t end up completing my entire backlog. I ended up adding even more crazy projects to it that I couldn’t just one-shot prompt my way out of. I ended up intensifying the kind of problems I tackled. If you are able to do everything, and aren’t failing, it means you are not pushing yourself enough and haven’t found your limits yet. When was the last time you actually failed at something? Pick something you’re sure you can’t do, and try it.
If you don’t keep on trying new things, it becomes harder to try new things. The inertia of the comfort zone is enough to lock you in. If I go to a new restaurant, I will keep trying new things until I find something I like. And, once I like something, I will almost always get the same thing. So, the only way for me to try new things then becomes changing the restaurant. Thankfully, I am okay with trying new places. Otherwise, I would never be able to find new things!
If you want to be really pedantic about this, there is the Gittins index,Introduced by John C. Gittins in 1979, the Gittins index gives the optimal strategy for the multi-armed bandit explore-versus-exploit problem: it assigns each option a dynamic score combining its expected reward with an uncertainty bonus for how little you have tried it, so you keep exploring unfamiliar dishes until every untried option’s score drops below your favourite. which tells you the absolute decision theory maths way of doing this.
Now, instead of trying to rely on your willpower to try something new, you need to put yourself somewhere where your default option isn’t on the menu.
We can try to rationalise that the fear of failure is kind of silly using some crude logic. If you are not familiar with Pascal’s wager, it basically says that it is better to believe God exists than it is to not:
| | God exists | God doesn’t exist |
|---|---|---|
| **You believe** | Infinite gain (heaven) | Finite loss (not much lost) |
| **You don’t believe** | Infinite loss (hell) | Finite gain (nothing changes) |
Pascal’s wager is famously a bit of a cheat, but it is a useful cheat. So, applying the same logic to trying new things:
| | It works out | It doesn’t work out |
|---|---|---|
| **You try** | You get the thing | You learn what didn’t work / you find your limits |
| **You don’t try** | Impossible | Guaranteed loss + atrophy (next time gets harder) |
Which means, not trying something new when you aren’t going to lose something if you fail is irrational! Yes, I filled the table to get the answer I wanted here, but if you are going to rationalise something, rationalise towards trying.
Nobody wants to admit that they are picking the bottom row, hence why you might be thinking, “If only I had X, then I’d be able to do Y.” But, have you actually pushed what you already have to its limits? Have you actually reached the failure set yet? Or are you trying to push off things because it is easier to not try?
Anytime you catch yourself waiting on X before starting Y, attempt Y without X until you actually hit the failure set and can definitely prove that X is what broke it.
If the frontier labs are to be believed, “programming is solved.” Even if that is true, it doesn’t mean every problem under the sun has been solved. It means that if you pose the problem, you can get a solution. Ambition used to be constrained by what you could do. Nowadays it is constrained by what you can think to attempt.
Personally, I don’t think we can brute-force every possible question-answer pair in the universe just yet, at least not until we understand the limits of our “search space.” So, what matters? What matters is asking questions you want answered. Your wants and needs in life made you ask that question. Just because you don’t want to achieve a grand plan doesn’t mean your petty annoyances cannot help you form a worthwhile question.
You should also ask yourself, “What is it that you are providing that is not being covered by the model’s weights already?” If 10 different people prompt “innovative ideas in cybersecurity”, there is a good chance that they are going to get the same or similar ideas. Try asking LLMs to tell you a joke. How many of them are going to eventually say the joke, “Why don’t scientists trust atoms? They make up everything”?
You should ask yourself whether ten strangers without your weird life/hobbies could have asked the same question. If yes, you are going to get the atom joke. You should be pulling from your own uber-specific annoyances and curiosities instead.
Life is full of contradictions, though! What if your question-answer pair was too simple in hindsight? Like anyone could have asked for it and gotten to it. Well, my dear reader, this is a question as old as modern art (if not older). “It is just a shade of blue; I could have done that.” I was recently at the Guggenheim, and although the day was very memorable for a very different reason, one of the art pieces, as you might be aware, was the famous banana. I am not saying I like modern art, but I kind of agree with the age-old adage:
“Anyone could do that.” “Yes, but they didn’t.”
Simply, ask for things that you are curious about.
Frank Calegari had a couple of really cool quotes on his guest post on [Terence Tao’s blog](https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/11/01/mathematics-has-changed-lets-act-like-it/):
> Choosing worthwhile problems may end up mattering more than producing proofs.
> The difference in reaction between the optimists and the pessimists is that, for the pessimists, the game is over. For the optimists, the game has just changed.
I am in the camp of hope-core. I would rather foolishly be optimistic about everything than be realistic. The fact that you are reading this piece probably means you have enough curiosity and/or will to live that you want to try and change things. You don’t have to radically change anything in your life to take the smallest step towards being more ambitious. Because isn’t it already being more ambitious by trying to do something new while still maintaining the status quo? You don’t have to quit your job or blow up 99% of your comfortable life: keep the status quo intact and bolt one weird experiment on the remaining per cent.
You don’t need to want more out of the life you already have. You just need to be curious enough to not let that stop you from finding out what else is possible. So, (if and only if you want <or not>) why don’t you turn those knobs up to eleven, and be more ambitious?