Ambition is a strange thing. It makes you aim for things that are sometimes beyond your reach and sometimes through a crazy maze of a path. It is when you are ready to do anything to take you there that you hustle. You do everything in your capacity to get there, even if that is at the cost of your happiness.
My personal happiness lies in living with my boyfriend. But, we are both ambitious and currently our ambitions are taking us to different countries, me staying put in the US and him to Spain. We could have probably tried getting postdoc positions in the same country, in the same city even, but we ended up doing what was best for our careers and not our personal lives. Sometimes I do think we might have been happier had we been even a little satisfied with what we have. But, that is not us. As soon as we achieve something, we raise our bars even higher aiming for more again. We know we’d regret it if we didn’t do that. It’s crazy. But hey, what can you do other than make peace with the fact.
We have set a deadline though. We are going to slog for two more years before starting to look for a permanent job in the same city. But, we have raised our bars from what we set out for in the beginning. We have decided to look for permanent faculty positions at research institutes, which is going to be tough, but also exciting. Imagine if we were to achieve that! We’d do something that no one in our families has done before us and that in itself is motivation enough. Let’s see where our ambitions take us eventually. And, if we finally manage to live together after the “slog years” that is the postdoc.
So, what’s your story? How ambitious are you?
Geek Girl
The Slog Years 