“All the Gold Stars” With Rainesford Stauffer
Journalist and writer Rainesford Stauffer has a complicated relationship with ambition, and it started when she was just a kid. She published a book, wrote for top publications and never stopped reaching for the next golden ring — until she was forced to.
Stauffer spent months interviewing teachers, parents, psychologists and organizers about how they define and practice ambition, all while trying to reconcile its impact on her own life. Her new book, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and All the Ways We Strive, is about the societal expectations that keep us striving for more and the tenuous balance between achieving your goals and burning out entirely.
If you were crushed by a B+ on your report card, spent hours practicing a hobby or sport you weren’t particularly passionate about because that’s what you were “supposed” to do or stubbornly climbed the corporate ladder only to find yourself thinking “What now?” at the top, this episode is for you.
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Reading this book with your book club? Here’s our discussion guide for All The Gold Stars.
Do you consider yourself ambitious? Why or why not? Can you point to certain examples of ambition in your own life?
Ambition can be viewed as a positive, but it can also be used against people we deem too ambitious. Why do we ascribe value to ambition for certain people but not others?
Think about your typical day. How many times throughout said day do you feel like you’re not good enough or not doing enough?
Have there been any moments in your life when you needed to confront your relationship to ambition, or when you were on the cusp of burning out — your “I’m done” moment? What happened? How did you right the ship and reframe your workload or your mindset?
Did the pandemic impact your relationship to work, achievements and ambition in any way? Why or why not?
If you were a high achiever as a kid and now have children, how does your approach to raising them differ from your own childhood?
What is your definition of success? How has this changed over time? Do you think it will be different in five years, ten years, 20 years?
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Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.
A while back I got a question. I got the question on Instagram, but I'm pretty sure that the person was a listener to this podcast, and I'm going to keep the question asker anonymous while sharing verbatim the question that they asked me, they wrote to me.
Is it bad that I'm happy with my simple life? I don't have ambition, but I'm happy.
It is probably trite to say that this question took my breath away, but it did. I felt an urgent need to reply to this person. Immediately, and because my thumbs could not work fast enough to convey all that I wanted to convey to them, I replied to their question with a video where I stumbled through what I am trying to say now, which is that no, of course there's nothing bad about being happy with your simple life.
Of course not, but I understand why they asked the question. I understood why they asked the question immediately. Because being happy with what you have and where you are is antithetical to the way that we are conditioned to live in the United States. It's antithetical to what we tend to value here in the United States. We value a winner, not just a one-time winner, but a multiple time winner. We love a success story. We love a success story that has a specific arc, a lot of accomplishments. A lot of ambition. Ambition that pays off with those accomplishments and of course, with money, can't forget the money.
What this person had was what a lot of ambitious people I know do not have- happiness. For many years, and at many points in my life, and not this day, but on other days, I would count myself in that number.
A person who has all the ambition and none of the happiness to me, this person has the only ambition worth striving for. They have it already. I understand why they ask the question because our productivity is tied to our value in society in many ways, and our value in society is tied to our productivity in the way that we value ourselves.
What have we done? What do we have to show for it? What can we provide to our families or our communities? What is enough and when will we know that we have it? What level of the game will unlock what this question asker already has? Happiness. These are the things that I think about all the time and talk about with the people in my life, and it's the subject of today's book.
Rainesford Stauffer is the author of the book, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive. Rainesford spent years interviewing researchers, parents, psychologists, labor organizers, all kinds of people from all walks of life to explore how ambition affects us on a personal and societal level.
Now poetically this book came together as Rainesford herself was having her own crisis of ambition and, you know, mental and physical health. As her physical and mental health were deteriorating. Rainesford had to reconcile what ambition meant for her now, what ambition had done for her and what ambition had done to her.
So this episode is for the strivers. It is for the doers. It is for the ones who keep going, even when they really, really should stop. Really, this episode is for everyone who has made handcuffs out of all those gold stars.
Nora: Tell me about your relationship to ambition, and we're going to start as early as possible. What's the first thing that comes to mind?
Rainesford Stauffer: The first thing that comes to mind when I think about being a kid in retrospect, is how much I savor the compliment. She's so responsible. She's so diligent. She's such a hard worker. funny when I talk about this now, when I talk about ambition now, because I think that people sometimes assume that because I have an uncomfortable relationship with this particular quality or trait, that I was a super high achieving student, that I was a part of.
I was at best an average student, but what I did have was this capacity to just knock myself out trying. And that is what I latched onto when I think of ambition as a kid. It wasn't the gold stars. It wasn't being the best at anything.
It was that I was the one that was willing to hang in there and try long past the point I should have given up. And that was the quality that I heard by teachers and other adults in my life. She's so diligent. She's so committed. She never stops trying. And when you're a kid, you soak all of that up.
You think that must be the best thing about me is that I'm willing to try so hard.
Nora: Did it end up being the best thing about you as you grew up?
Rainesford Stauffer: I wanted to laugh and say no, but I think it's, the honest answer is probably a little bit more complicated. On one hand I can look back on all of that and say, that was the most destructive thing about you that almost destroyed your physical and mental health, that almost destroyed relationships that ruined so much.
But I think at the time as I grew up, I associated striving with safety if I could just do enough, if I could just be enough, if I could just work hard enough, I would reach some hypothetical point where it felt safe to relax. I never really understood what that safety or that security looked like or felt like, or even what I was concretely aiming toward, which made it really easy to keep moving that goalpost.
When you're moving toward a theory don't know how that's supposed to look or feel, you don't know it even when you do have it.
Nora: What does that tenacity, which is what you're describing, that commitment to the effort, how does that show up in your childhood versus your adulthood as a kid?
You are the kind of kid who will be the last person running drills on the soccer team, even though you're a bench warmer and as an adult, what is that like?
What are those versions of yourself?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think of two examples from childhood that just come rushing back. The first one was that I was a ballet dancer for a very long time, which also really loved this quality that I brought out the perfectionism and the striving and the self-sacrifice in ways that I didn't pick up on at the time until well into adulthood.
But not only was I the kid that was obsessed with dancing and going to dance, I would have a meltdown if I felt like I wasn't there early enough. I wanted to be the one that got to the studio early, spent all this time stretching and preparing and unpacking and repacking the dance bag. I wanted to be the one that stayed after everyone.
I just wanted to be there all the time. And part of that was because I was a kid who really liked dance. And the other part of that is I wanted to be the one that was most committed. If I couldn't be the best one, I wanted to be the one that showed up. And then in high school, geometry. I was flunking that class.
And I mean, D's and F's, I don't mean like, oh, I got a B and that was a disappointment. I mean, I was truly failing. And I think everyone was kind of stumped because I had an outside tutor who was an older high school student who would work with me at the library. I came to the school tutoring sessions before and after school.
It was very puzzling because here I was showing up with all this effort and you could not tell at all. I ended up bringing in a bunch of Kleenex for extra credit at the end of the year to pass that class barely with a C and I don't remember being upset that I was failing math. I felt like I knew I was going to fail math, but I remember feeling like the only thing that was in my control or that I could do was be the one that tried the hardest. Even when I knew going in I was gonna fail. I still wanted to be a person that put in the above and beyond effort that I could come up with.
Nora: You mentioned wanting to feel this sense of safety. Did trying give you that sense of safety and how long did it last?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think trying gave me a sense of safety in the sense that for a split second, while I was devoting all of this energy and action to whatever the task at hand was, the thing I was striving toward was it distracted me enough to feel like I was doing something, like safety was within my grasp.
And here I was taking these steps to secure that for myself. I think the great mirage of that is that it's so fleeting. it would be safe, secure, oh, thank God I finished that. I made it through it for a split second, and then it would go right back to craving that sense of security again. And so it really became a false promise in that sense that I would talk myself into every time you've, you can do it, you can do it.
It's on the other side of this. And that evaporated as soon as I reached out to grab it every single time.
Nora: It's so interesting because you mentioned that when you write a book about ambition, when you write a book about striving, people assume that you are naturally a high achiever. Having written two books right now, you do sort of fall into the high achiever category. Anyone who looks you up on LinkedIn will be like, no, this, this is a person who has achieved quite a lot. What strikes this interest in ambition beyond just your own experience with it?
Rainesford Stauffer: I do think that the experience with the first book and where I was in my life at that point and conversations I was having with ambition led to the interest in it. I noticed ambition or this idea of striving and hard work and hustling coming up in conversations I was having anyway with friends or family or other sources that I was interviewing about work.
What really piqued my curiosity in that was that those conversations were happening just anecdotally at a time when I was like, I'm not ambitious anymore. I'm done with this. I'm exhausted. I can't even think straight. I'm done with this. This thing that has run so much of my life, it has finally run me over.
And when I heard those conversations, I was thinking about how many people were rethinking what ambition meant to them. I got to hear about it popping up in spaces that were not work or school or these traditional like milestone markers of ambition. It's like they were applying the intention and dedication and care it takes to be ambitious about something to other areas of their life, which I found fascinating.
And I think I found that so interesting because right around the time I was finishing the first book, the first book was coming out. It feels like the last five years of life are just completely blurred together. I was dealing with an obsessive compulsive disorder diagnosis that I did not feel like I was in a space to handle. I'm chronically ill. My physical health was getting worse.
It felt like relationships with loved ones felt up in the air in a way that was very out of character for me and felt unsettling all on its own. So it was this perfect storm of bad physically and mentally, not really knowing what I was doing in my life or where I was gonna go next. And then the book came out. Wildest dream, so grateful and was so completely thrown by the question, so what are you doing next?
Because to be totally honest, at that point, I was having a very hard time seeing how I was gonna make it to the next day, let alone take on the next job, or a next project, or a next thing I felt that passionate about. I was just scraping by, and that made me very interested in what happens when ambition goes away? Does it come back? Is there anything to replace it? It brought up all of these questions that got to the core of my identity for better or for worse, and a lot of times for worse.
Nora: As a person who has been driven by ambition, that is also really driven by fear, really driven by the pursuit of a sense of safety that is just as foggy as the one you described, right? Wanting to be okay in some way. Earn my keep, literally prove that I belong on this planet in some way. My ambition has been the catalyst, an accelerant for my success and for my discontent, for my depression, for my unhappiness, for the decay and dissolution of relationships. It is truly in the truest sense, like just a double edged sword. And it is cut both ways. And I would not be here without it.
Rainesford Stauffer: That's honestly the perfect way to put it, because I feel like you can't say, well, this is objectively bad. Like it would be disingenuous for me to sit here and say, ambition has brought only bad things to my life, because that's just not true. I think that that makes it a little trickier because it's really hard to hold on to the idea that something is responsible for the good parts of you while knowing it is the same thing that has tried to destroy you nine times out of 10 as well.
Nora: You have a goal in mind, and I, I'll want you to put this in your words, but if your goal is. Okay I am going to work so hard. I'm going to hone and craft. I'm to be, I'm going to become a professional writer, right? A person who can make her living writing. And you achieve that. And that's really hard to do. It's really, I cannot state how difficult that is to do, to make a living writing. Then your next sort of goal, is to write a book and you get to write a book. And again, that is such a huge accomplishment. That is something so few people get to write. But then there's that question, what's next? And to me, that question, what's next, immediately turns the taste of any accomplishment to sand in my mouth? What's next?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think that question is asked so often, even when it's not explicitly asked. I always think about when I talk to young people, people who are graduating high school or graduating college, and it's the same question. Well, where are you going to school? You don't know what you're gonna major in yet. What are you gonna do next? What do you mean you've graduated and you don't have a job? I think that that versions of that question carry all throughout adulthood and pop up in all different domains. For me, it was complicated a little bit by the fact that I felt like an imposter. Which I know is not a novel thought, but I really felt like I had people fooled in a way that I was not entirely comfortable with in thinking that I was doing all of this and I was working so hard because I was just really driven, or I was just really motivated and I had this unsettling feeling that part of the story, but it's not the whole thing.
It's not the accurate truth. And I think because I've always had a day job, I've always done other work in addition to the writing, it felt like even more of that sort of feeling of, well, you'd think what would be next would be getting to just right. And that hasn't been reality for all kinds of reasons.
And I think that that kind of threw me off a little bit too, is just feeling like, wow, done this thing that you've always wanted to do and you still feel this way. You still can't get it together. What is wrong with you?
Nora: I do wanna talk about the discovery of your, your O C D diagnosis. How does your O C D show up and what does it take for you to realize that that's what it is?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think the biggest ways that O C D shows up in my life is doing what I have come to describe to myself as freezing, and at the very worst looks like getting caught in a cycle of obsessions and compulsions, which for me is a lot of checking, a lot of procrastinating, a lot of avoidance, and then you throw in intrusive thoughts on top of that.
I've seen viral tweets about how my intrusive thoughts helped me cut the bangs I've always wanted in the middle of the night. And I think that it really does get conflated as an intrusive thought being something that just happens spontaneously and lets us unlock these secret things we've always wanted to do.
And I cannot express how damaging that is and how isolating it feels because you're sitting there with these really dark, gruesome things that don't feel like you, they don't feel like they're coming from you. And to have it portrayed as something that maybe deep down you want to have happen, it just adds.
Distress on top of distress. And I think that that was one of the biggest things that it took me a long time to riddle out with my ocd is I just thought I was a really bad person. And for a while I clung to the productivity side of that, or what I saw as the productivity side of that and didn't realize how often I was freezing.
I wouldn't respond to messages, I would decline calls from friends. It got to a point where it was very hard to leave the house because I was convinced that if I did something bad was going to happen and the bad thing was going to be my fault it was completely debilitating.
Nora: On the outside, Rainesford, things look so good. And I was on the outside, right? I was on the outside watching this new book of yours come out and watching you like what felt like, just like a rising star. All this looks so good and on the inside, how are you feeling?
Rainesford Stauffer: My first instinct was to say on the inside it felt like I was crumbling, but I think it was worse than that. I don't think I felt anything for a very long time. I think that the only thing I felt was fear, this sensation that I was letting someone down no matter what I did or didn't do. I felt very on edge, but also kind of disconnected from things that I had worked so hard for.
I felt disconnected from my writing. I felt like I had maybe run out of road on that, and there was nowhere else to take it, and that was disorienting. I felt like I was disconnected from my loved ones and relationships that I normally, hopefully showed up a lot better in because I couldn't figure out how to communicate this thing that I was feeling.
I called it paranoia and anxiety and nervousness, and it sucked up every area of my life. I think that I kept telling myself during that period, you'll know when it gets really bad.
You'll know when it's quote unquote rock bottom. You'll know when you can't do it anymore. And then one day I had the epiphany that maybe this was my version of that, this sensation of just having to drag myself through these things and not really feel anything and feel like I didn't even know how to ask for support.
I felt kind of caught in this weird purgatory where it didn't seem to be bad enough for everything to fall apart. So I felt a lot of pressure to just keep going, and at the same time felt so horrible on the inside. And of course, all of that coincided with feeling really ungrateful, that I felt so bad while so many wonderful things were happening in my life.
Nora: Yeah, how dare you suffer the idea that gratitude is some sort of blunt object that can be used to minimize everything else that if you are grateful, you simply will not feel any of these other things that if you are grateful, nothing else. Can be true, right? If you're, if you're grateful, you won't feel this burned out.
If you're grateful, you won't feel sick inside when you open your email and what you just said, which is what I've heard from so many people who do so many different kinds of jobs, I guess I'll know when it gets really bad because everything will go wrong. Meanwhile, the only reason things haven't gone wrong is because you yourself have taken on the mantle of every possible worst case scenario, and you, yourself are the thing that is taking the brunt of all of that.
How bad could it get? Well, I guess you could die, but as long as you're not dead, I guess. I guess you keep going.
Rainesford Stauffer: I think it kind of goes back to the childhood thing. Not to bring everything back to that, but the idea that resilience and stick in there, hang in there, do what you can. Just keep going. It's gonna work itself out. I think that that was so ingrained in me for such a long time in this instance it really backfired because often as that tenacity had served me in a positive way, it had me circling the drain of my own life for way too long I thought, this is just how it feels.
This is how it feels to try hard. This is how it feels to push through. Everyone around you is handling things, why can't you? And I told that to myself over and over and over.
Nora: In order for you to get to an okay place in order for you to take care of your mental health and therefore also your physical health, what do you have to do and how does that relate to your ambition or do to it?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think a couple things come to mind because honestly, the first one is that I am still better at taking care of myself for other people than I am taking care of myself for myself. And so I spend a lot of time telling myself. You wanna be able to show up as a daughter and as a sister, and as a friend, and as a colleague and a community member.
And so in order to do that the way you want to participate, you have to get yourself to a baseline of feeling semi-okay in your own skin most of the time. First, because you've tried it the other way and it didn't work. You thought you were hiding it, you thought you were keeping it all to yourself. You really weren't.
You just didn't know how to ask for help. So I think that that's always kind of the starting point for me, is figuring out, how do I want to show up for the other people in my life who have brought so much good to my life that it makes me want to participate, it makes me want to return it. Not out of obligation, but because it feels good, because it's fun, because it's nice.
I think the more concrete answer is that treating the O C D in some ways feels like the hardest thing I've ever done. Again, in addition to doing nothing to choosing not to engage in those thoughts, to not engage in those compulsions, in those actions, it goes against the O C D for sure.
But I think it also goes against some of my natural personality, which is that of an oldest daughter and a problem solver, and somebody who loves to swoop in and try and take care of everything and fix it and get it off the desk, and I can't do that now. I have to figure out different ways to engage in my own life.
I think the good thing about that, Is I have gotten to see more of myself come back than I have seen in a really long time, and that was very unexpected. I didn't realize it had gotten that bad, so that was a fun surprise of like, oh, first of all, it was that bad. Second of all, welcome back to your ambition.
Welcome back to your life.
Nora: I texted you the other night about your article in The Cut about O C D and ambition and what it means for you, your career, your life, who you are. I had chills reading it. What is the darker side of your O C D that people do not see?
Rainesford Stauffer: Two things come to mind. One darker side you can see from the outside. And the other you probably can't. The other you probably can't is intrusive thoughts, I won't describe in a ton of detail, but they always involve something bad happening to someone that I care about. And it is always my fault.
And I think what makes those so explicit and so painful and so distressing is that number one, I'm the one inflicting the pain in those scenarios, whether literally, or because of my actions, it's created this cause and effect scenario. In my experience, it's different from. normal thought I might have, and that sounds obvious to say it's an intrusive thought by definition.
It's one that does not align with who you are as a person or your values, but it feels almost like they are scenes projected in front of my eyeballs that I am watching in the most close up visceral version that you could get. And I think that the resulting suicidal ideation of having to sit with so many of those thoughts for so long is probably the darker side that nobody would see because I'd be [00:28:00] having a totally normal conversation for work or talking to a friend, whatever the case may be.
And I do remember a couple different times thinking like, what would they think of me if they knew what I was watching as I was talking to them, that I was trying to participate in this conversation while thinking. All of these atrocious things and wanting so badly to get out of my own mind so I could quit them. And then I think the other one that originally I think was in the essay a lot more is I went through a pretty intense phase of pulling my hair out. Which is not cute or fun to talk about, but it was a reality of O C D for me. A lot of the times it was a compulsion that happened and I didn't even realize it was happening.
It would be very absent minded until I looked down and there would be a giant ball of hair and a lot less hair up at my scalp. I think being frozen was a big one because I lost out on having … This is probably the greatest regret of my life actually.
I lost out on having so many important conversations with people I cared about because I physically couldn't get the words out of my mouth. I was so convinced I'd say the wrong thing. I was so convinced it would backfire somehow. And of course I'd already played out every which way that could go wrong, that lost the capacity to express needs, and I associated that with a risk that I couldn't tolerate.
I lost the capacity to express what I want, both in the big picture of what I want for my life, and as simple as, Hey, what do you want for dinner? I couldn't say any of that, and I think that that led to me coming off as really avoidant or really standoffish or these things that once I've treated this, I'm really not.
And I feel like I lost so many moments and so many conversations that I'll never have the opportunity to do over because of that. So that's the one that keeps me up at night.
What it means for me to not give into an O C D trigger and avoid those thoughts comes from this behavioral therapy called exposure and response prevention, which is exactly what it sounds like.
You do the thing or have the thought that makes you anxious and then you resist doing the compulsive behavior. For example, being interviewed makes me very nervous, but I responded to this email, um, and that sounds like such a tiny example, but it's literally choosing not for me. It's literally choosing not to engage with the thought and letting the fear and the uncertainty exist, and slowly over time, letting my body and brain figure out that, hey, [00:31:00] We can face this, we can do this without engaging in these behaviors, and it's going to be fine.
Nora: You mentioned the feeling of like coming back to yourself, I think is how you put it.
Rainesford Stauffer: Mm-hmm.
Nora: What does that feel like, to feel like Fainesford again?
Rainesford Stauffer: I think a little bit more disturbingly is that the process of this disorder and other external stuff that heaped right onto it, took over so much of my life for so long that I didn't realize that I had become completely disconnected from myself. have an opinion, a need, a want that I felt comfortable letting come out of my mouth.
That definitely dipped into my ambition for a while where it was like, who are you to aspire to? You need to sit down. You need to stay still. You need to not open your mouth about any of this and just pray the world does not come crashing down around you. And so I was always so puzzled by that question, and it wasn't until fairly recently that I finally realized that was why for a long time I had no sense of self.
I think that that's what happens when. it's a disorder or it's just fear, it's perfectionism. It's an overlap of all of these things that gobble you up and swallow you and spit you back out. And I think that the thing that I've really learned this year and over the course of writing the book is that in moving through all of this, I have gotten to meet a more ambitious version of me, and I say more ambitious in the sense that.
There's a clarity to the ambition and a contentment in the ambition that didn't exist before. that you can want something and also know it's not gonna be the thing that makes or breaks your world, that you can want all kinds of things professionally and personally, and the world is not going to end because you desired something.
It's going to be okay. And then I think that there are the other offshoots of ambition that I felt like I had lost so much of where for a long time it felt like there was no creativity or no sense of humor or no goofiness and, Those were things that were parts of me for a really long time.
There's been a lot of relief, I think, in rediscovering that those things were still sitting there. It wasn't this rigid ambition with a one track mind and staying on track and being committed and so, so disciplined. It was actually a much lighter ambition, a much more expansive ambition, and one where I'm willing to do things or have conversations or pursue something that feels meaningful and also not let it hold all of the meaning.
What it means for me to not give into an O C D trigger and avoid those thoughts comes from this behavioral therapy called exposure and response prevention, which is exactly what it sounds like.
You do the thing or have the thought that makes you anxious and then you resist doing the compulsive behavior. For example, being interviewed makes me very nervous, but I responded to this email, um, and that sounds like such a tiny example, but it's literally choosing not for me. It's literally choosing not to engage with the thought and letting the fear and the uncertainty exist, and slowly over time, letting my body and brain figure out that, hey, We can face this, we can do this without engaging in these behaviors, and it's going to be fine.
Nora: So you're treating your O C D, you're practicing exposure and response therapy, trying to find a more manageable form of ambition for yourself. You're having these conversations with researchers, with people of all ages, all backgrounds, all genders, what are you learning about ambition and the ways that it affects other people individually and us as a culture?
Rainesford Stauffer: This is such a cliche thing to say, but the conversations I had with people for this book completely changed my life to the point where I felt like I was learning so much in the conversations. I was distracted from the actual writing of the book because I just wanted to keep going back to people who had been so generous already with their time, and what blew my mind about how ambition popped up in those conversations was the hold it had on people's sense of self that played out in so many different domains.
I was not surprised to hear about ambitions or one kind of ambitions grip on someone's experience in school or at work, but I was fascinated by how it was showing up in mental health, their sense of who they were as a person in their family, in their community context, in their workplace.
And then on the flip side, getting to hear about how people were ambitious in ways that I didn't think of traditionally is ambitious. That they were ambitious about care and they were ambitious about friendship. And I think a lot of the time when we talk about something like ambition in those spaces, it takes on this kind of transactional tone of networking or meeting people and exchanging business cards.
And that's not what people were talking about. They were talking about applying the same amount of intention and care to those things as they would to something that they wanted to accomplish. And of course, I also heard from a lot of people who were like, I'm done being ambitious. This is not for me.
I don't think that there's an honest conversation about ambition, who is considered ambitious, what looks like ambition as we know it. I don't think we can have that conversation without talking about all the intersecting factors of capitalism and socioeconomic status and class and race and access and these American myths of what it means to be a quote unquote ambitious person.
Nora: I was not surprised to see this as your second book, because An Ordinary Age … I was approximately 15 years older than your target audience at the time. But it resonated with me. It resonated with every person who has been young.
I've given that book to so many people who are in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties. I recommended that book to so many people because even in An Ordinary Age, this pressure to make your twenties … these are the best years … you better optimize them. You better get as much out of it. Everybody that I know has lived through that kind of pressure, and I feel like that has been amplified, accelerated by this sort of second gilded age that we are living in, this sort of second industrial revolution where now everything is monitored, right?
If you are at McDonald's if you work at Amazon, they're tracking every step you take and every time your arm moves. If you are at McDonald's, they're tracking how many fries you're moving . Everything has to be optimized. It is truly an exhausting era to be alive in. I also lived through and participated in and was burned by the Girl Boss era, the Etsy era, which they flowed right into each other nicely.
Oh, you have a hobby that you enjoy. How can you monetize it? Oh, you have a regular job. Well, have you thought of having a side hustle? And I see on TikTok when I get these windows into other generations and other ways that people live the perpetuation of that. Right. Here's my five to nine before my nine to five. Here's my five to nine after my nine to five. And the other side of it too, which is don't show the effort.
Rainesford Stauffer: Oh yeah.
Nora: Don't show the effort that you're, try hard, try hards are losers, right? To try hard to show your effort is uncool. And I have experienced that also, right? You want to be ambitious as a woman, you wanna be driven, but not too driven.
And we expect, especially female CEOs to be building whatever empire they're building for the greater good in a way that we do not expect out of men. I had this conversation with the writer Leigh Stein, maybe a few years ago about, how she had turned her hobby into a side hustle, which really took over her life, depleted her mental health, depleted her everything. She asked a question to which neither of us had the answer. She said, Well, I still struggle with where do we put that ambition now after we've been through something like this. Once you've burned out, once you've been burned, do we put that? And the most impactful chapter for me out of this book was chapter 12, which is almost embarrassingly, something I had never thought of as an aspect of ambition. And I'm going to do something that embarrasses me when other people do it.
I'm gonna read your words to you.
“When I asked friends for advice, I'd hedge. You did this to me, by the way, only if you have time. It's truly no big deal. You don't owe me anything. Actually, a friend told me once, I hope we owe each other a lot. We owe each other everything that matters. This feels like a backward way to open a conversation on how inherently ambitious the act of caring for each other is to tell you that.
As much as I want to care for others, I've spent most of my adulthood so far thinking I didn't deserve it. As if rigidity would keep me on track and gentleness would let me off too easy. To care for one another, to make one another's lives better is the ultimate ambition, the heartbeat that creates the rhythm for everything else. When we believe it's all up to us, it's all on us. It becomes too easy to cut ourselves out of interdependence.”
Rainesford Stauffer: I think that the place we put ambition is each other. I think one of the most ambitious things we will do is not just learn and practice caring for each other, but also reaching the point where we feel like we are worthy of that same level of care and gentleness and intention.
That's taken me such a long time to have that epiphany and I feel like I've missed so much having not had it up until this point. And I think that that will always be the work in progress. In the background of this book or writing this particular chapter, actually my grandfather, who has since died, was really, really ill.
And so my family was navigating caregiving, logistics, everything that goes into that, the kinds of toll it takes on different people participating. And so in one way, that felt very material, that there were other family health issues happening behind the scenes, that there were other different kinds of caregiving that I was seen for the first time and in retrospect, seen a lot of caregiving and caretaking that I had grown up with and not necessarily recognized as such at the time.
That was coinciding with the fact that I needed help, there was no other way for me to get to the next phase, to get out of the hole that I was digging for myself by insisting I was fine without taking help, and it really flipped the script on that for me. I would like to say that I'm someone that has always valued care, and in theory that's absolutely true, but it took me a really long time to reach the place where this is a reciprocal practice. This isn't just something you give, this is also something you take and that's a good thing. That's how it's supposed to work. That's how we're ambitious for each other.
Nora: I had a question come through on Instagram and I ended up writing a sub that I also put your book in because somebody had said, all I want is a nice little life and what a perfect ambition to have. What a perfect ambition to have. And one of my second cousins commented on it and she said, “I've always been adjacent to accomplishment. I thought less of myself for it.” And Jenna, if you're listening, I look at her life where she grows this beautiful pollinator garden in Southern California and she's so in tune with the land and what it needs and what bugs are coming in and what birds are coming in and I think that's so beautiful.
Who wouldn't want that? Why is that somehow less valuable than, whatever friend of hers climbed whatever mountain or got whatever promotion. I sense a lot of people trying to recalibrate themselves, particularly after the last few years, which every person I know the last few years were doing more with absolutely fewer resources.
No one got a break from work. You simply saved 90 minutes of commute time and jammed that into sitting at your desk, giving yourself like a pinched nerve in your upper back from hunching over a laptop on Zoom calls.
Rainesford Stauffer: There's someone that I interviewed named Remy, who is a mid ish thirties, first generation American who self-described as a goodie two shoes, a straight A's, do the right thing, perfectionist kid, which I loved.
And the way Remy talked about how ambition intersected with different parts of her identity, her upbringing, their religion, their role in their workplace really stood out to me for a lot of reasons. And eventually, after having to leave their job to treat severe burnout that was fueled by savings and severance from a previous layoff, Remi went back to work and found a job that was very notably not a dream job.
They avoided pursuing mission-driven work because it fed too much into those old habits of tying identity and goodness to ambition and how that ambition manifested. And Remy said that … the hope is that doing this job can build a solid nest egg. She can have boundaries that maybe she didn't before.
She can redistribute wealth to communities, she can have hobbies again. But also they said that maybe they could not be so goddamned intense about my life's purpose or my legacy or anything, and chill.
And to me, that encapsulated so much because that's what so many of us are trying to do. We want to have a good and meaningful life.
We want to do good things for our loved ones and our communities and the world. And we also want to feel like human beings while we're doing those things.
Nora: I do think it's so important to remember like every life has a purpose. Like there's purpose in just being alive. It doesn't need to be a performance piece, and it doesn't need to be, there's ways to produce good things outside of being a productivity machine.
Rainesford Stauffer: I'd add that it's okay to be ambitious and have your ambitions change, because I think that that's the part that throws a lot of people. I think it can be really jarring when all of a sudden either the plans don't go according to plan or your wants and needs and circumstances just change. It's okay to have an ambition that ends up not being your lifelong ambition. They can come and go.
This is Terrible Reading Club, and I'm Nora McInerny. This has been an episode of Terrible Reading Club.
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