Brits can be ambivalent, at best, about aiming higher – maybe just earning a living and getting by is enough

What are you really aiming for in life? Do you still have goals? Perhaps you’ve abandoned your earlier dreams. Maybe you’re an embittered loser or perhaps you’re perfectly happy with where you’ve got to.

Brits can be ambivalent, at best, about ambition. The vote for Brexit was greeted with jubilation by the 52% who wanted it. But the ambition of many Leave voters was to get back to an earlier, supposedly simpler version of British life, and not to march boldly on into an unknown future.

Should we be aiming a bit higher? It’s a competitive world out there and perhaps we need to make our peace with ambition; go back in on Monday morning and shoot for the top. Except that the workplace can be fraught and complicated and there are difficult trade-offs to manage. Organisations and bureaucracy can combine to keep us in an “iron cage”, the German sociologist Max Weber observed. We could waste a lot of energy – and suffer a lot of grief – in the attempt to realise our ambitions. Maybe just earning a living and getting by is ambition enough.

I hate feeling like I’ve let myself down or the team around me down by not being as good as I can be Victoria Pendleton

“There is no job of your life out there, waiting to be found,” Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor at the Insead business school, wrote in a piece for the Harvard Business Review in 2012. “There are only jobs that may make you feel more or less alive.”

Michelle Mone, the serial entrepreneur, founder of Ultimo lingerie and now a member of the House of Lords, is unashamedly, unrelentingly ambitious.

“I think it’s all down to self-respect and looking at yourself in the mirror and asking: ‘Am I happy with myself?’” she says. “If you’re happy with yourself, then fair enough.” Yet she isn’t happy. “I always look in the mirror and I say to myself: ‘You can do more.’ So I push myself all the time. I set goals all the time, I just don’t stop. But once I achieve them, I set more. I’d rather be ambitious than lazy. So I’m proud that I am ambitious.”

For Victoria Pendleton, the Olympic track cycling gold medallist, ambition has always taken the form of a personal challenge. “For me it’s always been a really big battle against myself and what I think I’m physically and mentally capable of,” she says. “It’s very high expectations, I guess, of what I can achieve. I hate feeling like I’ve let myself down or the team around me down by not being as good as I can be.”

Not all of us can be gold medal winners or multi-millionaire business moguls. So how should we recognise what ambition can do for us? What would constitute sensible and meaningful ambition?

Maybe we could start by being more careful with the language we use, which can be off-putting to some. Myles Downey, an executive coach and author, says that we have spoken of people having “drive” for a long time. But this feels like a rather blinkered, and overwhelmingly male, approach. He prefers to talk about people having “desire”. Downey has been working with one client recently, a senior executive, who has a big job, huge responsibility, is a success… and yet he’s “in profound pain”, as Downey puts it. “He’s lost what he used to enjoy about life, abandoned things he was good at,” he says. Laura Empson, professor at Cass business school in London, has labelled such people “insecure overachievers”.

You need the will to succeed, but you also need love, Downey says. Draw on both these qualities and harmful drive can become fulfilling desire. Perhaps the most powerful depiction in literature of ambition, and the harm it can do, is in Macbeth. A new production has just opened at the National Theatre in London, directed by Rufus Norris and starring Anne-Marie Duff and Rory Kinnear. Many of its themes feel more timely than ever, in particular Lady Macbeth’s speech addressed to her absent husband:

“Yet do I fear thy nature.

It is too full of the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great,

Art not without ambition, but without

The illness should attend it.”

(Act I, scene 5)

“If you look at anyone successful, anyone successful that I’ve known,” explains Norris, “there is an illness that attends it, and it’s an illness that enables you, to one degree or another, to cut off your humanity, because your success inevitably means someone else not quite making it, whether that’s me going up against a couple of people I knew really well for the job that I’m now in [artistic director of the National Theatre], or the bank manager getting the bank manager’s job, or somebody putting their child into private school, because it’s a form of ambition.”

Yet it is within the confines of the Macbeth marriage that the spark of ambition catches fire. “In some ways they are Shakespeare’s happiest married couple,” Norris says. “The play in one way is a brilliant dissection of a divorce, or a separation of a very strong relationship.”

This is what untamed ambition can do to even the strongest of marriages. And it can also derail careers, too. “Ambition and competitiveness… they can manifest themselves in different ways,” says Duff, reflecting on her own profession. “They can be an internal thing, where you have to strive to be better and better, which can be quite self-flagellating – got to get this right – or it can be looking over your shoulder seeing what other people have, and for some people that’s a great drive, to compare and contrast, but that can make people very unhappy in my experience. So you might want to have the former, which is about having an ambition within your creativity.”

Some people are just permanently ambitious. Rupert Murdoch, who turns 87 today, is not giving up. Ever. Martin Sorrell, who is 73, is equally firmly in place at WPP, the world’s biggest advertising business. Normal people would have retired by now, having achieved what they have achieved. But these two are not normal. Something drives them on that can perhaps never be satisfied.

Does this set a good example to others? Maybe, and maybe not. In the corporate world “talent” is sought and encouraged to flourish, with a view to spotting leaders of the future. But this can promote what Jennifer and Gianpiero Petriglieri, both from the Insead business school in France, have called “the talent curse”. In an article for the Harvard Business Review last year, they argued that businesses should break this cycle. “They should stop referring to talented young managers as ‘future leaders’, since it encourages bland conformity, risk-averse thinking and stilted behaviour.”

Driven individuals can waste their lives jockeying for position

The journalist and author George Monbiot takes an even harder line on thrusting ambition. “The world has been wrecked by people seeking status through their work,” he wrote last month. “In many professions – such as fossil fuel energy companies, weapons manufacture, banking, advertising – your prestige rises with the harm you do. The greater your destruction of other people’s lives, the greater your contribution to shareholder value.”

Maybe the French chef Sébastien Bras, who recently gave up his three Michelin stars in search of a calmer and happier life, offers a helpful alternative role model. “I want to give a new meaning to my life… and redefine what is essential,” he said.

So what are you ambitious for, really? Isn’t peace of mind ultimately more important than material possessions? Beyond a certain level of financial comfort, does more money make you any happier? Most research suggests not. As Professor Richard Sennett wrote in The Culture of the New Capitalism more than a decade ago: “Certainly, driven individuals can waste their lives jockeying for position… But most adults learn how to tame the beast of ambition; we live for more than that reason.”

It was Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in El Salvador in 1980, who suggested we might consider a different sort of ambition: “Aspire not to have more but to be more,” he said. So yes, perhaps we should all be aiming higher. But it is our broader quality of life and wellbeing, and not merely a rise up the income scale, that we could be focusing our energies on.

The National Theatre’s Macbeth will be shown live at cinemas around the country on 10 May