A few days ago, I was in bed, getting ready to fall asleep. Often when I’m lying in bed, I listen to a talk by Thich Nhat Hanh on SoundCloud. I find his voice and insights very soothing and it helps me calm my thoughts down and go to sleep gently.

That night again, I was listening to one of his talks called “The 4 Qualities of Happiness.” It started off with a great intro and ideas around how to live a happy life by grounding yourself and how to do it.

It talked about what true freedom means, getting rid of anger and other afflictions, then he said something I wasn’t prepared to hear at all:

“Freedom here is freedom from craving, from anger, from hate, from despair [pause] . . . from ambition. All these afflictions make you not free. The happiness of a person very much relies on her freedom. If you have so much worries, anxieties in your heart, you are not free.”

Within a second I was wide awake. The face I made must have been this one.





I rewound and listened to this part of the talk about 2-3 more times. I couldn’t believe it at first.

Being completely honest with myself, my whole life was and is built on ambition. I sometimes think of myself as living and loving what people call “the hustle.” I get up, I put a lot of hours in and I’m very happy with I’ve been getting back.

I often get compliments for that, too, which makes me feel very good and feeds my ego further to keep things up in that way, with that level of ambition. If anything, ambition seems to be one of the most esteemed things to strive for in the Western world. Or at least in the world that I’ve grown up in.