The Ambition Pursuit Mindset

The Ambition Pursuit Mindset is a framework of personal practices that maximize your odds of success in seeking self actualization and achieving fulfillment in your life. It is designed to help you explore all sectors of your inner compass and encourage you to live a well-rounded holistic life. It is built on the belief that the intrinsic purpose of life is to fully actualize one self—that is, to express the whole of your soul into reality, to practice and apply all your innate potentials and talents into practice, and to manifest all your driving desires into life results.

Seven Practices to Maximize Self Actualization

It is an evolving framework of seven carefully crafted practices, put together after thousands of hours of research, design, and trial-and-error in the real world. It is a culmination of what modern theories and ancient philosophies have to offer in terms of practical advice on the topic of self actualization. Recommendations from major bodies of wisdom have been interpreted, condensed, simplified, and presented in an actionable format for the present-day modern lifestyle. Each practice consists of proprietary recommendations, which are opinionated due to necessity, so that the practitioner is offered simple, nimble, and yet most effective set of tools and methodologies to apply in their daily lives. See bibliography for a list references of paradigms, frameworks, and methodologies analyzed.

1. Dream your Destiny: Understand what you desire from life and imagine what you want your life to feel like to you

2. Prioritize your Dreams: Be sure of where you want to go next this very moment.

3. Focus your Priorities: Define your result action plan—Hone in on the most important results you need to produce to get there

4. Act your Focus: Be at the right places, during the right times, doing the right things, which produce your results.

5. Retrospect your Actions: Celebrate, if you are getting closer to your results; Calibrate, if not.

6. Streamline your Productivity: Reorganize your world to pave the fastest road to your results

7. Improve your Odds: Train to be willing, able, and ready—to strike when your opportunities emerge, to glide when they don’t, and to dodge if you get hit!

How These Practices Work Together for You

Each of these practices forms a piece of the puzzle that together steer us toward making our hours, days, and years highly tuned to our needs and desires.

1. Dream your Destiny: The first step in your journey toward self actualization is to understand your inner self—what you want to express to the world, which innate talents and potentials lay dormant inside you, and how you desire to use your time on this planet. This practice helps you articulate your inner compass in a manner which you can visualize, understand, and process to define a holistic path forward for self fulfillment.

2. Prioritize your Dreams: Channeling your dreams into a prioritized sequence of ambitions in the most important exercise to take charge of your life. In many ways, dreaming is the easy part, getting $#it done is the hard part. And when you don’t have a clear resolve about where you are going next—right now, this very moment—then it is very easy to lose your sense of direction amidst all the forces that act upon your life—emotions, relationships, sustenance, trivial pleasures, fear of pain, etc. This practice helps you think strategically to design a three-year roadmap of ambitions that are most important to your life, while taking into account all aspects of your life.

3. Focus your Priorities: Having accomplished the previous practice and designing a clear set of priorities for yourself will do wonders for your psyche, but it will only result in buildup of “potential energy” inside you. This practice is then geared toward converting it into “kinetic energy”, i.e., to get your really really close to action, by helping you define a set of real-life results that you can go after, something you can feel, touch, taste, share, feel proud of, and most importantly accomplish in a matter of weeks or a month.

4. Act your Focus: When you persist this far into these practices, your ambitions will begin to feel almost inevitable. But translating imagination into reality is the hardest thing to do, especially if what you are trying to accomplish is significantly different from what you have done before. This practice is designed to help you keep your eyes set on your results, maintain your commitment levels, and sustain your progress one inch at a time, while you do the slow dance of manifestation.

The above four practices would be sufficient to live an amazing life of fulfillment and actualization for the truly gifted people and for those with good amount of luck. The extremely gifted or lucky ones probably won’t even need those four I imagine! But for the rest of us, the remaining three practices are essential to make it in the long haul.

5. Retrospect your Actions: When you try anything new, no matter how thoughtfully your plan, how much you prepare, and how carefully you work, your first attempt won’t likely produce the exact result you desired. This is because you lack the fourth ingredient in the mix—experience, something that can only be gained by practicing over time. The practice of retrospection encourages you to evaluate your performance against the results and ambitions you’re committed to, and realign your approach. And when you get it right, or you feel you are on the right track, to take a moment to recognize and celebrate this feat of personal growth!

6. Streamline your Productivity: The complexities of modern life require us to juggle multiple responsibilities, projects, and tasks every day. Even when you narrow your day-to-day focus down to just one or two priorities, most likely there is a lot more else going on in your life that you need to take care of. This practice and its recommended tools help you get things done faster, stay on top of real world dynamics, and ensure you don’t miss out on enjoying the life you have been working so hard to make,

7. Improve your Odds: When you persistently follow all the above six practices, you might begin to feel like you are truly in charge of your life. But are you? There are so many factors and forces acting upon us at all times, that the age old trope of simply working your way to success seems more like a fantasy than a reflection of human experience. Often fate conspires such that all your vision, goals, designs, work ethic, thoughtfulness, and productivity only lets you cover half the distance toward your ambitions. The remaining half must be covered by your character—the kind of person you are in the moment of truth, with your on-the-feet thinking, when making split-second decisions, when the going gets tough, during conflicts, and when passing through the thick and thin of any pursuit worth living for. And this is the emphasis of the last practice—maximizing your potential through personal growth so that you are ready when you get punched in your face.

PursuitPal app Helps You Apply These Practices Effectively

While these practices appear simple in concept and may seem like common sense, applying them in day-to-day practice is an insurmountable feat in itself. We do wonder sometimes what is ultimately responsible for a person’s success: these practices themselves, or the grit that one develops by successfully practicing them? We have no way to know! But we know for sure that you will need help in putting them to practice. That’s why we built the PursuitPal app, your private digital companion for Ambition Pursuit Living, which strives to keep you on track conveniently at all times, no matter where you happen to be—on your computer, tablet, or mobile.