Most people -- husband guesses 80% -- are basically unambitious. This includes me. If life is ok, rent is getting paid, everyone's healthy, nothing hurts -- then we're not going to bother working super hard. We'd rather be comfortable.

I don't think this is immoral. If you can provide enough value to provide for your needs honorably without breaking a sweat, IMO that's valid.

But there are people, and they're not THAT rare, who actually have ambitions. Everything can be fine and they can still be like "gotta do better".

Not all of them are rich or famous, not by a long shot.

But if you're self-made rich, you *DEFINITELY* give a shit about something besides comfort. I mean that literally, I think, without caveats.

You can totally get rich by fraud or other unethical behavior. Not all rich people are admirable. But even a fraudster could at some point just save effort by...not doing that and just getting a normal job. Big fraudsters *do* have ambition, just not the healthy kind.

Anyhow, the reason this is relevant is that we tend to assume "people work a certain way", and that way is the way we work (and maybe our friends and family.)

I always assumed that the motivation for people's behavior was stuff like "to fit in with the crowd, to save effort, to feel good in the moment." Everybody wants to believe they're an exception to the rule, but mostly, in my experience, they'e not.

BUT. that's just not true when you're dealing with an ambitious person, a person who wants to achieve "greatness" in some way.

If Elon Musk is doing something you think is dumb, there could be a couple things going on.

You could be wrong, and the thing is actually smart for reasons you don't understand.

He could be wrong, and sincerely think it's a good idea.

He could even have psychological hangups that compel him to do the dumb thing against his better judgment.

But he DEFINITELY doesn't have the psychological hangup of "just do what everyone else does to fit in and be liked."

He's Elon Musk. He doesn't work that way. There's no way he could do the things he does if he worked that way.

(Yes, I know he cultivates his image. Image management is a broad category, and not all of it is the same as "just try to be liked and normal" in the diffuse, conformist way that non-ambitious people do it.)

And I just picked him because he's famous and everyone knows what I'm talking about.

I bet, like, the guy who builds a local strip mall is ALSO like that.