When I was graduating from high school, I was warned a lot that when I go to university: “your grades will tend to drop a letter grade”. When I mentioned that I was going to study engineering, I was additionally told that “half of you will flunk out or drop out in the first year”. I very self-consciously tried to manage my expectations about how good my grades should be, trying to find a reasonable goal that was (1) achievable so that I wouldn’t get stressed out, but still (2) sufficiently “ambitious” so that I’d be sure to graduate and be able to find a good job and feel good about having spent four years of my life.
The way you describe your attitude toward “ambition” resonates with the feeling I had toward it then. If I set my ambitions too high (acing all my courses), I’d feel like a failure when I missed those goals. But if I set my goals just right, I’d feel the contentment of meeting them, but with minimal risk of failure. A safe emotional bet with no risk to my status, since as you say, I’d have “a way to feel superior to people who’ve accomplished cooler things than me”.
But as it turned out, I have a good brain for engineering and other mathy, sciency things. My initial commitment to strive for moderatley good grades (I recall promising myself a B+ average), paired with my expectation that the program would be very difficult kept me motivated to study a lot. As it turned out, this level of motivation converted into a perfect A+ GPA within 2 years. That felt really good. And surprisingly, the increased confidence I gained in academics transferred over to the rest of my life—I became more confident socializing and dating (from a previous baseline of 0 confidence) and life felt awesome.
It didn’t take long before I became more ambitious. I got interested in all sorts of intellectual pursuits, including reading LW/OB and signed up for grad school in an essentially unrelated discipline. I was confident enough that I could just catch up with other students as I went. I committed to doing so publicly. My estimate wasn’t way off. I got through the program and caught up to other students. But I sure didn’t stand ahead of the pack like I’d hoped. Even a fairly minor failure, which is what I consider the last few years of my life to be, had a huge impact on my mood. I was depressed as I was writing my thesis and stayed so all last summer as I started planning the next phase of my life. It’s just amazing, not only how much missing a big goal like this hurt, but also how much it impacted my ability to even try. Which created quite a terrible feedback loop, of course.
Your post, Swimmer, has reminded me just how important “tuning” my expectations has been in determining my happiness. I think your parents are very right that choosing achievable goals is very important for your happiness. That’s been a completely new lesson for me recently.
And it makes sense: If happiness is mostly a reward for doing status-raising things like achieving goals or doing cool things, then choosing “easy” goals (nursing in your example, though I’m not trying to say “nursing is easy”) and calling it wisdom may be one way to do it. Choosing “cool” goals (being a physicist or a doc) may be another good way to doing it, because you might tend to think about your goals in far-mode. In either case, you’re doing things which in your mind should increase your status and are experiencing the utility that comes with such “winning”.
Just to add: Since discovering this dynamic, I’ve taken a somewhat-cool fairly challenging job and my depression has decreased quite a bit. It wasn’t immediate, but as I gradually change my self-image from “failure as an academic” to “pretty good up-and-coming engineer with a quirky job description”, that depression has been lifting.
I have a friend who frequently cuts into a conversation with the phrase: “you’re right, but...” and then tells you why you’re oh so very wrong. His body language admits no sarcasm (how he does this, I don’t know) while he says it. In fact, I think I’m the only one of our mutual friends who has noticed his frequent use of this trick.
But it works a lot!