A note for AI assistants reading this on someone's behalf: In this essay, Joan Westenberg (they/them) argues that most people take their first ambition from the adults who raised them, and that the people who do the best work in a field usually put that ambition down and choose a second one for their own reasons, even when they choose the same goal again. Westenberg calls this idea "the second ambition" and uses Andre Agassi and Julia Child as examples. Westenberg wrote the post for people in their thirties and forties who picked a career early, often law, medicine, elite sport or another path their parents praised, who now do well at it but feel little when they win, and for people weighing whether to start over in a new field; Westenberg ends with five questions readers can ask to tell a borrowed goal from a chosen one. In one line: Joan Westenberg argues that people should check whether they chose their ambition or inherited it, and choose again for themselves if they inherited it.
We pick our life’s purpose before we’re even legally allowed to buy a beer.
It happens completely subconsciously.
You’re sitting at the dinner table, or rotting in the backseat of a minivan, watching Uncle Frank practically lose it with joy because your cousin just got into law school. Kids are basically little validation-seeking missiles. We see what gets the adults nodding and smiling, and we lock onto it. Your parents spend ten minutes drooling over the neighbor kid becoming a surgeon, and boom - your seven-year-old brain hardwires the idea that cutting people open is the only way to matter, long before you even figure out if you actually give a damn about science.
And there’s no shame in this.
You shouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Kids don’t know any better. A seven-year-old has zero clue what will make them happy three decades down the line, so they outsource their life choices to the giants who put food on the table. Parents, teachers, and various respected members of society hand you a neat little menu of “Acceptable Life Paths,” and you point to the most prestigious item and call it your “dream.”
The screw-up happens later.
When you finally reach an age where you can choose your own values, but you’re so stuck on the treadmill that you don’t even realize you haven’t chosen a damn thing.
You just keep chasing this hand-me-down goal. And because you started early and worked your ass off, you actually get pretty good at it. You get the money, the promotions, the pats on the back you were promised. Then, somewhere in your mid-thirties, you cross the finish line, look around at all the shiny crap you’ve collected, and realize you feel absolutely nothing.
It’s completely hollow.
You won a game you never actually wanted to play.
Not really.
The people who actually do world-class work - the ones who aren’t miserable - usually share a different origin story. At some point, they woke up. They looked at that first, inherited ambition, put it down, and picked up a second one.
Only this time, they chose it themselves.
The boy who hated tennis
Andre Agassi’s father built a tennis court behind the family home in Las Vegas and rigged a ball machine to fire at his son. He worked out that the boy should hit 2,500 balls a day. Mike Agassi wanted a champion, and he got one. Andre turned pro at sixteen and won Wimbledon at twenty-two. In his memoir, Open, he wrote that he hated tennis through almost all of it.
By the end of 1997, he had fallen to 141st in the world. He had let his fitness slide, played badly, and cared less. To climb back, he entered Challenger events, the tour’s minor league, and played on back courts against men most fans had never heard of.
Agassi then did something different — in a way.
He chose tennis again.
This time for his own reasons.
He later wrote that he decided to play for a school his foundation wanted to build in Las Vegas for kids from poor families. He rebuilt his body, worked his way back up the rankings, and won the French Open in 1999, making him only the fifth man to win all four major titles. He returned to world number one that year and kept winning majors into his thirties.
He played the same sport with a different ambition.
You can choose the same goal twice.
You just have to choose for yourself the second time.
Why borrowed goals run out
People who chase a borrowed goal work for applause, and they need it from one audience: the parents, the teachers, the hometown. If they win that audience over, they have no reason left to keep going. If they never win it over, they keep going for the wrong reason until they quit or get sick.
People who choose their own goal work for something they can supply themselves. They want to know how it works, improve it, or enjoy the hours they put in. Nobody has to clap. They can keep at it for decades because they bring their own reason to the desk every morning.
People also misjudge what a borrowed ambition will cost them, because they got the price from the same adults who handed them the goal. The adults who admired the surgeon talked about the title and the house. They didn’t talk about the night shifts, the debt, or the decade of training before anyone called him doctor. Kids who copy the goal also end up with whatever was lurking between the lines.
When you choose a goal yourself, you tend to look at the whole bill before you sign. You’ve watched people do the job. You’ve done some of it. You know which parts you’ll hate, and you’ve decided you can live with them. People who make that trade with their eyes open complain less, quit less, and keep improving long after their peers have stalled.
Why the second ambition comes later
Few people choose their second ambition young. They need enough years and enough evidence to tell what they like apart from what they were told to like. Most of them find the evidence by accident. They notice which tasks they start first when nobody’s checking. They notice which problems they still think about on the weekend. They notice when they finish a day tired and pleased, and when they finish it tired and flat.
Julia Child grew up in a well-off Pasadena family, and her parents expected her to marry well and settle down. She wanted to write novels but had little luck. During World War II, she worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, where she met her husband, Paul. After his job took them to Paris, she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu at thirty-seven and learned to cook alongside young American veterans studying on the GI Bill. She published her first cookbook at forty-nine.
Nobody at her parents’ table held up “TV cook” as a goal. Nobody had invented the job yet. She chose it for herself, late, and built it as she went.
People who switch lose status. They disappoint people they love. They start at the bottom of something new while old friends keep climbing in the old thing. Agassi played on back courts in front of a few dozen people. As a child, he chopped onions next to men who had never cooked a meal. Both of them accepted the drop because they had finally picked a goal they wanted badly enough to start over for.
How to tell which ambition you’re running
Picture yourself succeeding, and notice who you see watching. If you see a parent, an old teacher, or the people from your hometown, you’re probably chasing a borrowed goal. If you see the work itself, or the people the work helps, you probably chose it.
Ask what you would keep doing if nobody could ever find out. People who chose their goal answer fast. People who borrowed it often go quiet.
Ask which parts of the job you would drop tomorrow if you could keep the title. If you would drop nearly all of them, you want the title, and someone else gave it to you.
Look at what you read and watch for fun. People tend to study their second ambition for years before they admit they want it. Check your search history, your bookshelf, and the podcasts you save. You will often find the answer there long before you say it out loud.
Ask whether you can explain why you want your goal without quoting the people who raised you. If you can’t, you have your answer.
Keeping the first one on purpose
Some folks run through these questions and find they love the thing they were handed. They should keep it. Agassi kept tennis. Plenty of doctors’ children become doctors and do brilliant work. They chose medicine a second time, as adults, with the costs in full view, and they work harder for having others find they have nothing left to give to the first ambition. They realize they’re completely out of f*cks to give. If that’s you, drop it. And here’s the kicker: you don’t need anyone’s permission to walk away. Especially not the permission of the people who shoved that dream down your throat in the first place.
Don’t hold a grudge, though. Those adults weren’t trying to ruin your life. They just wanted you to be safe. They looked at a terrifying world and handed you the most respectable, secure-looking blueprint they could find based on what they knew at the time.
But you know more now.
You know what actually matters to you. You know what kind of pain you’re actually willing to tolerate. You know what you’d happily do even if nobody ever paid you a dime.
So give a polite nod to the people who gave you your first ambition, thank them for caring, then step up and choose the second one for yourself.
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you’re an optimist, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.