Rainesford Stauffer explores how 'being behind' is one of ambition's biggest myths
Keeping up with where I wanted to be always felt like a race, a deep personal desire mixed with the sensation I was running out of time, no matter how early I started, no matter how hard I sprinted. It wasn’t until I dug deeper into ambition’s relationship with time that I discovered being behind is a myth—one that had been running my life, convincing me that, if I just tried a little harder, I could outrun the sensation that I was failing at everything I brushed against.
I’d written books but wasn’t a full-time writer; I’d picked myself up after my personal life and health imploded. But now that I was upright, I didn’t know how to step forward. In fact, secretly, I thought I should’ve been more on track by now, even when the track simply wasn’t there anymore. “One foot in front of the other,” I’d tell myself. “Just keep going”—toward the future I yearned for, to see the plans I’d made become real, to imagined security in thinking I could stop.
Of course, the sensation of feeling behind wouldn’t exist without templates for what is considered “ahead.” All around us are ideas of the “right” timeline on which to do anything: to graduate college , to find our calling , to get married, to start saving for retirement , to have children —an ever-expanding list that spans the professional and personal.
Then, there’s layered assumptions: That the earlier you choose your path, the more you must have wanted it. That if youI wasn’t alone in the sensation that time and ambition were linked. “The need to maximize time was kind of the original ambition,”, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin told me. It sits at the intersection of industrial capitalism, where time is money, and the Protestant work ethic, where time is worth, she explained.
And those so-called norms leave out so many experiences of timelines and ambition. Journalist and educator
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