Ambition - What's your ambition?

There are many times I have wondered why I'm not 'Ambitious'. By ambitious I mean that go-get-it feeling, fire-in-the-belly, I'm going to make it etc etc. On a scale of 1 to 10 I'd rate myself a 6. I wouldn't want to lay back and do nothing, I do want to do something and do it well so that at the end of the day or life, I can look back and smile contently.

A few of my questions were answered in class. My HR and Organizational Behavior professors would discuss how people are different. You can't expect the same thing from each one. That is why we have job profiles and roles. A painter could not do the work of an engineer. You could train him to be an engineer but he'd be miserable. Same with an engineer. He likes to make stuff, experiment around and debug. He won't be happy as a human resource manager trying to understand people and how they work. He mostly understand programmes or buildings.

Makes sense?

So how is this related to ambition? Well in a way trying to link myself as to what kind of person I am and what role, what job description suits me most. I know instinctively I am more right brain - creative kind but at the same time a good does of left brains (I can count! :) ) Probably, that's the reason why I could fit in any job role yet what I really do want to do is two things:

a) To teach

b) To write

Teaching - I wanted to be a teacher since 12Th grade. I remember the time when we were applying for our under graduation courses for the University of Nairobi, I had kept B.Ed as my first choice. My teachers and classmates were shocked. According to them, teaching was the last thing one selected if they couldn't get into any of the other degrees. They expected me to select Medicine or Dentistry since I was their top student. I decided to let go a that moment. I wanted to be a University professor. If I took up B.Ed I'd be a high school teacher - which is also cool. I think teenagers are adorable, full of energy and creative ideas. Along the way, through my degree, the rush for a career made me forget about teaching. Now, it's all come back. In my mind, I keep thinking of new ways to teach - not the standard classroom teaching, but getting my students on the streets, if I'm teaching them sales, I throw a challenge to them. Have a game - divide the class into teams. Give them a bunch of balloons for e.g. and tell them - Select your target market, make your strategies, and get me the end figure. You have exactly one hour. I picture them running to the streets and actually selling! I strongly believe that would help a student especially one who has never sold a thing in his life, how the whole system actually works. All this is done withing the class hours and at the end, I ask them to write a short write-up and what they learnt using 'Sales Management' language :)

Writing - Writing is a therapy. It helps calm one's racing thoughts, arrange them, express them, move someone to tears, communicate with someone totally unknown yet make them feel, you know them well. It's a weapon through which you could spread your ideas, thoughts, change the way people think, change their perception, make their world beautiful, give them hope. Writing enables millions of people to read and know millions of things. Writing is your way of spreading your knowledge and sharing it with others.

There, the two most attractive livelihood that make me sit up, make me think and make me move. This is how ambitious I am. I could run a business 10/10 or join a firm 8/10 , I could decide a million other things, but in my heart the two most special roles I'd like to play is that of a teacher and that of a writer. 6/10.

Now I ask you - How ambitious are you? :)