Amina AlTai is an executive coach, leadership trainer, and chronic illness advocate. She has partnered with companies such as Google, Snap, Outdoor Voices, Chief, and Roku, and been featured in goop, Forbes, Well Good, NBC, CBS, and The New York Times. She is an Entrepreneur Magazine expert-in-residence, Forbes contributor, and was named one of Success Magazine’s Women of Influence.

The Ambition Trap gives you greater permission to reclaim ambition on your own terms. Most of us think ambition means doing everything in our power to get what we want, but this approach comes at the price of health, well-being, and upholds oppressive systems. Ambition itself is not a dirty word—we can renegotiate unhealthy assumptions about ambition to engage with it in meaningful and restorative ways. To escape the trap of an endless cycle of overwork that is never enough, ambition must be anchored in our purpose rather than our pain.

Below, Amina shares five key insights from her new book, The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living. Listen to the audio version—read by Amina herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.

Most of us only know ambition in a dysfunctional sense: a relentless desire to succeed, regardless of the cost. For me to win, someone else must lose, we think. But that’s not ambition. Ambition itself is natural and neutral. In its purest form, it’s a desire for more life. It’s a wish to unfold, evolve, and flourish.

Grass wants to grow; trees like to stretch toward the sun; we all want to thrive. The essence of all living beings is to be motivated for more, and as humans, we’re the only species that has a choice in how we direct that advancement. So, we must be great stewards of it. Things go sideways when our striving begins to cost us and others health, relationships, peace of mind, and sense of self. This isn’t ambition in its neutral, natural form, but in its most painful.

Though ambition in and of itself is neutral and natural, there are two ways we usually see it unfold. It can either be painful ambition or purposeful ambition. Painful ambition is the voracious desire to advance,........

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