In Chapter 6, we identified 10 ambition traps which all came down to identifying how to avoid falling into unhelpful thought patterns. It’s not your fault if you have fallen into these thought patterns, because they are all around us. We’ve given you short tips throughout the book that will boost your way to success, and plenty of specific advice from our experts.

The great thing about the secrets in this chapter is that you don’t need to worry about whether you are capable of achieving them – just think of them as simple directions to follow so that your journey goes smoothly. Using these five simple secrets you will be able to further develop your willpower and strengthen your motivation to achieve your ambitions. Eventually you’ll find that implementing all the advice we’ve given you so far will come easily.

1. Go With The Flow

“ Find a wave that helps you, and ride it. ”

Chris Baréz-Brown, creative and business beatnik

To date, there are roughly two schools of thought on success. One is based on deciding on your goal(s) and working hard to make these happen, no matter what. The other is based on visualizing your dream, thinking positively and believing success will come to you because you deserve it. You may have tried either or both these ways already. For some people, maybe these methods work. The problem is they don’t work for everyone. If you’ve been lucky to hit on an ambition that fits your psychological make-up, your natural aptitudes and strengths, and you’re in an environment where this is possible, then either of these might work. But for most people there is more trial and error.

Instead of trial and error we suggest a different approach: enter and try-it-all.

When you arrive in an exciting new city you will probably have downloaded a couple of apps, and researched the places that most interest you. You’ll have an idea of what you want to see and where you want to go. You want to make the most of your time in London or Paris or New York because you know that if you arrive with zero planning, your time will easily be frittered away. But of course, you don’t want a clockwork plan, hour by hour, you allow for spontaneity too. Your approach to a city break is the one you need for your life too: a plan that allows for spontaneity, change and adventure. Just because a bar is on your list because it’s rated number one on Trip Advisor doesn’t mean you have to stay there if it’s too crowded when you arrive, you don’t feel like cocktails anyway – and you spot a pop up bar-restaurant that’s not even listed yet across the road.

2. Set Complementary Goals

As we saw in Chapter 7 how you set goals is crucial to your success and is an important aspect of learning to be ambitious. Remember, the key is to choose goals that gear you up to taking action now towards a future goal. Since real ambition is multidimensional, we want to address setting goals in different areas of your life.

One of the problems with setting goals is getting too focused on the individual elements without seeing them as one. One goal is to get promoted at work (which means working overtime). Another goal is to go for coffee with three different people from three different dating sites every week (which involves spending time online sifting through profiles, making contact, establishing a rapport and making an arrangement). Well that’s not going to work is it? What’s more the goals will cancel each other out so you end up not doing one or the other.

Professor of Psychology and licensed clinical psychologist Lisa Fortlouis Wood favours using the wheel of life method to mark where you’re at and where you’d like to be. First, draw a circle and divide it into the different areas of your life. Write down how things are now and what you’d like to achieve. Once completed, you can see clearly everything that’s within the circle. Then you always have your wheel of life to remind you of all the areas in your life where things are going well, areas that might get forgotten, as well as spotting where there might be conflict.

It’s the master of willpower who advises that we set complementary goals. Baumeister¹ refers to a 1988 Michigan State university study,² which found that when people set conflicting goals their health is affected, they worry more and get less done. When we interviewed Baumeister for Psychologies magazine,³ he affirmed his advice on setting aside a day every year to reflect, having a ‘vague’ five-year objective, thinking in terms of major goals, and then making specific intermediate goals through monthly plans.

3. Find Like-Minded People

One of the things that might be dragging you down is a feeling that one way or another you are surrounded by people who don’t understand you. At one end of the scale perhaps all your friends are sailing through their careers or getting married, and you feel left behind. Or maybe all your friends are moaning about no opportunities, relationships being rubbish, and you feel they’re all dragging you down. You may be somewhere in between, experiencing both and feeling there is something wrong with you.

The thing is, if we go back to the pure meaning of ambition, it’s about striving for a desire. This immediately indicates that you want something different. It doesn’t matter what that is. If all your friends like Chinese food and you hate it, will going for a Chinese meal with them every week make you like it? If you used to like Indian takeaways but ever since you got a dodgy tummy you can’t stand the smell, and your partner insists on ordering Indian takeaways, are you going to like them again? In both scenarios you will feel exasperated, annoyed, angry, fed up. It’s the same with anything else in your life.

There is ample research that shows being with like-minded people is crucial. It’s what psychologists refer to as contagious willpower. Think about support groups from Alcoholics Anonymous to Weight Watchers. People find it easier to give something up within a group of individuals they can connect with.

“ Hang out with people who are more ambitious and brave than you – who you hang out with does influence who you become, so if you are safe and timid and risk averse … ”

Chris Baréz-Brown, creative and business beatnik

One of the biggest studies on the subject was by Nicholas Christakis at Harvard Medical School and James Fowler at University of California San Diego.⁴ They looked at the Framingham Heart Study which tracked the lives of 12,000 residents for 32 years, with intimate details of their lives. Christakis and Fowler found that obesity and drinking are contagious. But so is giving up smoking. Their research concluded that we have an in-built instinct to mirror others around us. Happiness, they found, spread from friend to friend.

There’s just one snag that psychologists have identified when it comes to goal contagion. You can’t catch new goals. If all your friends want to make the maximum amount of money in the least amount of time and are taking jobs in sales or in finance, while you want to study a new skill so that you can set up a business, they won’t ‘catch’ your goal. You, however, might be ‘infected’ because as a group they will be on the same wavelength, boosting each other. This will undermine you. To strengthen your ambition you need to find others who are also studying a new skill and aspiring to set up a business. And you also need people who are further along the line who can be healthy role models and even mentors.

4. Know The Difference Between Like And Want

Surely they’re more or less the same thing? Why would anyone want what they don’t like? Why would anyone not want what they like? When you watch a toddler it’s obvious that they have definite don’t-likes. They spit out vegetables, they won’t go on the slides, they refuse a spoon and won’t wear the orange shoes. As we move from childhood to adolescence to adulthood all sorts of things happen: we become conditioned by our environment, we cover up our feelings to please others, we’re swamped with choice and we also fall into routines.

If you rush out to work every day and gobble up some cereal because it’s easy, you might have never thought about whether you like it or want it until you go on holiday and discover eating pineapple for breakfast excites you, or having scrambled eggs sets you up really well for the day and you don’t snack on rubbish. It’s easier to consider tangible things and figure out like/want. Once you click into asking yourself the question at every point you will notice all sorts of shifts. You will be drawn to healthier food, for example, as you realize that no, you don’t want the unhealthy fast food, and yes, you kind of like burgers and fries but not really because you feel bloated and heavy afterwards. Being mindful of a habit like eating fast food will motivate you to at least try a healthy food chain so that you shift your taste buds and habits gradually and effectively.

When it comes to our inner world, however, the process becomes more challenging. Yes, it can be deeply uncomfortable and strange. But we can promise you it’s also exciting. From the small details in your life to the complete picture, working out like vs want maximizes your ability to achieve your vision of success.

5. Think Feasible

What? Feasible? Isn’t that boring? Isn’t that consigning your dreams to the bin and telling you to keep calm and carry on? Have we tricked you into reading this far only to tell you it’s all one big lie? Absolutely not. We could have chosen a different word, like realistic or strategic. We like the word feasible, however, because in-built in this word is the idea that something will happen, it’ll work out, it’ll be real.

Unfortunately many people let their fantasies get out of hand. As Gabriele Oettingen outlines in her book Rethinking Positive Thinking – Inside the New Science of Motivation⁵ ‘fantasies only deplete efforts and lead us to stumble over and over again’. Oettingen has been researching fantasy since the nineties, and with her colleagues has conducted detailed studies in Germany and the US on how dreaming about a goal affects achieving it. From shoes to weight, studying to dating, the research arrives at the same conclusion: dreaming about achieving a goal can actually get in the way completely.

As Oettingen explains in the book, there’s a difference between being optimistic based on your experiences, which might lead to positive expectations, and what she calls ‘free-flowing thought and images rooted in wishes and desires’. Oettingen refers not only to her own research but to other studies demonstrating that day dreaming can be a coping mechanism that helps get you through a boring day, but there is no long-term benefit. ‘Our dreams may be realizable,’ she writes, ‘but they come down to challenges that require engagement and action.’

So, you need to be engaged with your dream – that means you must feel truly energized and excited, enough to want to take action. Psychologists have studied the bit in between your intentions and actions, and refer to it as implementation-intentions. Oettingen’s husband in fact has conducted studies on this.⁶ The key is one word: plan.

You can’t plan without being realistic. Realistic doesn’t mean negative. When your mind throws up all the obstacles in your way, being negative is insisting that you’ve no hope. But if you believed that, you wouldn’t be reading this book. Being realistic involves being creative about what you need to do, how, and even when.

Going with the flow, setting complementary goals, being with like-minded people, knowing the difference between like and want, and thinking about what’s feasible will lead you to success without exhausting you and without you giving up. By this stage you are equipped to embrace these five simple secrets because we have steered you away from success based on old-style ambition. You’ll be able to go with the flow because your thinking has shifted away from ambition being associated with hard-edged no-matter-what attitudes. You’ll be able to set complementary goals because you will be focusing on developing ambitions that match your inner needs. As part of this you’ll be looking to be with like-minded people who share your values and approach to life because you’ve also learnt that this is crucial to maximizing your willpower. Your awareness now of your inner needs means you will be tuned in to what you like right now. And being rooted in the now will help you plan in a way that’s realistic so that your goals are feasible – in other words achievable. With these five simple secrets you can build your way to a success that’s not a fantasy or an unimaginable dream. With these five simple secrets you can start to build small successes into your life now.