Being Overly Ambitious Is a Liability, Not a Quality

While I was reading a paper magazine, I stumbled upon an interesting topic that I felt genuinely curious about, but immediately I started wondering "how useful / how profitable is this going to be for me?"
Seeing everything through the prism of a grand objective has important drawbacks.

You become rigid. When you have a goal in mind, you often tend to have a preconceived idea of what it takes to get there. And the bigger the objective, the more delusional this thinking is. The steps you need to take to reach a far away goal often don't look like the end goal. That's just how it is. Life opens a lot of doors along the way but they don't look like they lead to where you want to go. So you pass on real opportunities that don't look like ones while jumping on what you think are ones but are just traps. An entire—and fantastic—book has been written on this idea. How many opportunities have I brushed off in the past? Years later, I reflect on several of those and can clearly identify very interesting ones, that I didn't recognize or choose to pursue at the time, because they didn't look like the rigid picture of what a successful path looked like to me. Nearly all successful stories are founded on happy accidents, not intentional steering, as everyone likes to tell or hear. From these unexpected circumstances, someone has been able to flow and adapt. A wave has appeared and someone rode the wave. But they didn't create the wave, only hopped on it at the right time, sometimes without even knowing it right away.

You ruin the experience. You are not in the present, you are focused on the outcome. So everything you do becomes just an obstacle to getting where you think you're going, in other words, everything becomes a chore. And when what you do becomes a chore, you don't put love in it. You don't give your best, and you don't infuse with positive energy, which is what other people can pick up on.

A good life is one that is lived in the flow, being fluid, and doing things full-heartedly, infusing your actions with the energy of love. Being fueled by ambition precludes living such a life.