Still Ambitious. Just Not for the Same Things.

Someone once asked me if I was still ambitious. At the time, I thought the answer was obvious. Now I think the question is far more interesting.

For most of my adult life, ambition was easy to recognise.

It had a salary attached to it.

A job title. A bigger remit. A more senior seat at the table.

Another problem to solve, another transformation to lead, another target to hit.

I was good at that world.

I understood how success worked inside it and, for a very long time, I wanted more of it.

Then I left.

And somewhere along the way, somebody asked me a question that irritated the life out of me.

“Are you still ambitious?”

Still?

I remember thinking, What the hell does that mean?

Of course I was still ambitious.

I'd left a successful corporate career and started The Life Edits from scratch. I was learning new technology, building a website, writing, creating, working with women, figuring out digital marketing and doing approximately 700 things I had absolutely no idea how to do.

If anything, I thought I was being more ambitious.

I had simply swapped the boardroom for something of my own.

But I've been thinking about that question again recently.

And my answer has changed. Not because I've lost my ambition.

I'm just no longer entirely sure ambition means what I thought it did.

I left the ladder. Apparently, I packed the measuring tape.

There is a slightly inconvenient truth about leaving a successful career.

You can leave the company remarkably quickly. Leaving the conditioning takes considerably longer.

For decades, I knew how to measure whether I was doing well.

Salary. Position. Responsibility. Recognition. Influence. Progression.

There was always another marker telling me whether I was moving forwards.

Then I created The Life Edits and, without really noticing, I created a whole new set of markers.

Was it growing?

Was I getting clients?

Was the website working?

Was my audience increasing?

Was the newsletter growing?

Was I earning enough from it?

Could it become bigger?

Should it become bigger?

Different office.

Same bloody measuring tape.

I think that's what I've finally started questioning.

Not whether I'm ambitious.

Why everything I care about has to become a measure of my ambition.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting the biggest version.

That's probably the biggest change.

When I started The Life Edits, I wanted to see what I could make of it.

Of course I did.

I'm naturally curious, driven and slightly incapable of doing anything without immediately thinking about what else it could become.

But something has shifted. I still love The Life Edits.

I'm sitting here now rebuilding the entire thing because I want it to become something better, more thoughtful, more editorial and much more reflective of who I am now.

But I don't want it consuming my life.

I don't want endless clients.

I don't want my diary filled because apparently being fully booked is evidence that I've succeeded.

I don't particularly want to build an enormous coaching business.

And I'm definitely not interested in recreating a 50-hour working week from the comfort of my own home and calling it freedom.

That doesn't excite me anymore.

For a while, I wondered whether that meant I'd lost something.

That perhaps I'd become less driven. Less commercially minded. Less ambitious.

I don't think I have.

I think I've become more selective about what deserves my ambition.

Because I still want to build things.

Here's where I become a complete contradiction.

I'm talking about wanting less while Christophe and I are actively imagining a future that could involve building a business together.

And that excites me enormously. The thought of finding something that becomes ours, creating it together, making commercial decisions, shaping the experience, figuring out how it works, making it profitable, probably project-managing Christophe within an inch of his life...

Now we're talking. That part of me hasn't disappeared anywhere.

I still love ideas.

I love possibility.

I love taking something from what if? to look what we built.

I like money.

I like financial independence.

I like making good commercial decisions.

And I certainly haven't developed some sudden philosophical objection to revenue. I just don't want revenue to be the most interesting thing about my life.

That's different.

Maybe ambition isn't the problem. Maybe the target moved.

This is the bit I'm still figuring out.

Perhaps I haven't redefined ambition at all. Perhaps I've simply changed what I'm ambitious for. I'm ambitious for a brilliant marriage.

There. I said it.

And I know we're not supposed to talk about relationships as ambition because apparently ambition must involve a spreadsheet, but building an extraordinary life with another person takes intention too.

I'm ambitious for the life Christophe and I are creating.

I'm ambitious about where we live. What we build. How we spend our time.

The experiences we have.

The freedom we protect.

The financial decisions we make.

I'm ambitious about remaining curious and doing work that keeps my brain alive without allowing that work to swallow everything else.

And yes, I suspect there will be another business.

There may be another substantial commercial chapter.

There may even be another period when I become completely obsessed with building something and have to be forcibly removed from my laptop.

I know myself well enough not to rule any of that out.

But I want the whole thing now. Not success at the expense of life. Success as part of a life I actually want.

That's a much harder target.

Women are allowed to want something other than more.

I've become increasingly irritated by the way we talk about reinvention in midlife.

Apparently, we're allowed to reject the old definition of success provided we immediately start achieving the shit out of a new one.

Leave corporate. Start the business. Write the book. Launch the podcast. Monetise your expertise. Build your personal brand. Scale.

Christ alive.

Can the woman not just have a Tuesday afternoon?

Why does every reinvention need a revenue model attached to it? Why does everything we're good at eventually have to become something we sell?

And why, after spending decades proving what we're capable of, are we so uncomfortable when a woman says:

Actually, I have enough.

Enough doesn't mean no appetite.

It doesn't mean no ideas.

It doesn't mean you're sitting around waiting for life to happen to you.

Sometimes enough simply means this part doesn't need to get bigger.

That's where I've landed with The Life Edits.

I want it to be good. Really good. I want the writing to matter. I want women to find something here that makes them think differently.

I want to keep developing it because I enjoy developing it.

But I no longer need to squeeze every possible pound out of it to justify its existence.

That feels surprisingly radical after a lifetime of measuring output.

I don't want to retire from ambition. I want to enjoy it.

Perhaps that's the distinction.

The old ambition always had something slightly hungry about it. Reach the next thing. Secure the next thing. Earn the next thing. Prove the next thing.

Today's ambition feels different.

There's more curiosity in it.

More choice.

And considerably less interest in impressing anybody.

I want to follow the things that make me lean forward.

A property.

A business idea.

A place.

A conversation.

A piece of writing.

A completely ridiculous plan Christophe and I dream up over dinner that somehow becomes considerably less ridiculous three months later.

That's where I want my energy going.

And when something doesn't make me lean forward anymore? I'm getting much better at letting it become smaller. That's not laziness.

And it certainly isn't a lack of ambition.

It's discernment.

So, am I still ambitious?

Absolutely.

But I don't feel the same urgency to demonstrate it anymore.

I still want an extraordinary life. I still want to create and I

I still want to earn.

I still want to build something with Christophe and discover what we're capable of together. I still want the ideas, the projects, the excitement and probably a healthy amount of chaos.

But I also want long lunches.

Travel.

A home we love.

Space in my diary.

Time to write when I have something worth saying.

A marriage that gets the best of me rather than whatever energy happens to be left after work. And the freedom to decide that something I've built is already big enough.

Maybe that's contradictory.

Fine.

I'm 56. I'm allowed to contain more than one idea at a time.

I can want a quieter life and still build a business, can't I?

I can care about money without making it my scoreboard.

I can make The Life Edits smaller while making another part of my life bigger.

I can be deeply ambitious and still decide that joy gets a seat at the table when I'm choosing where that ambition goes.

Perhaps that's what has really changed.

For most of my career, I asked:

How far can I take this?

Now I'm much more interested in asking:

Do I actually want to?