I read something recently about first-generation people who build wealth and how some of them carry something close to aggressive megalomania. It is an uncomfortable phrase, but I understood it. Not because I am anywhere close to that world, but because the emotion behind it felt familiar. The hunger. The force. The need to push harder than what looks reasonable from the outside.
I think there comes a point when you are building from scratch where doing “well” stops feeling enough. You don’t want a decent outcome. You don’t want a safe outcome. You want something big enough to match the amount of pressure you have carried in your head. Maybe that is not healthy, but that is honestly how it feels. If I am going to give so much of myself to something, then it cannot become just another average thing. I need it to matter.
And this is where I think the aggressive part comes in. I have become more ruthless with myself. I don’t have a lot of patience for excuses anymore, especially my own. I believe in brute force a lot more than I probably should. If something is not moving, push harder. If something is not working, fix it. If life is not opening the door, break the bloody thing open. That is not always the most balanced way to live, but I would be lying if I said I don’t think like that.
I don’t think I was always like this. I was ambitious earlier also, but after I lost my mother, something changed in me. My graph changed. My mindset changed. My relationship with work changed. I don’t think I can explain it perfectly, but I know that after she was gone, I stopped feeling like I could live an average life. Something inside me became restless, but also more aggressive.
Work became the place where I could put everything I did not know what to do with. The grief, the confusion, the emptiness, the pressure, the anger, all of it. I don’t think I sat down and decided that this is how I will deal with loss. It just happened slowly. If I was working, I felt like I was moving. If I was building, I felt like I was doing something with the life I still had.
There are days when I genuinely wonder what I would do if I did not work. And I know that sounds a little unhealthy, but it is true. If I am not working, thinking, creating, planning, fixing something, or moving something forward, I start feeling empty. Life starts feeling meaningless when I am not building something. I don’t say that proudly. I am just trying to be honest about how my head works now.
My mother put me in a position where I am capable enough to pursue whatever I want to pursue. She gave me the environment, the strength, the values, the support, and the belief to even think this big. So somewhere in my head, I feel like I have no excuse to not do the most I can with my life. I don’t mean this in a filmy way. It is just how I feel.
Her picture is on my table, and I look at it every day. There are days when I am tired, irritated, mentally exhausted, and completely done with everything. Then I look at her picture, and somehow I get the energy to continue. It reminds me of what she gave me and what I should be doing with it. Not in a dramatic “destiny” way, but in a very real, everyday way.
I think this is why the idea of aggressive megalomania stayed with me. Because first-generation ambition is not always clean. It is not just discipline, strategy, or goal setting. It is also emotion. It is grief. It is anger. It is responsibility. It is the need to prove something, sometimes to the world, but mostly to yourself. You want to build something big because anything small starts feeling like it will not justify what you have gone through.
And I feel guilty about that sometimes. I feel guilty that I attach so much meaning to work. I feel guilty that I can make business problems feel like life problems. I feel guilty that a setback can affect my entire mood. I feel guilty that I sometimes cannot separate my sense of self from what I am building. That is where ambition starts becoming a little scary.
Because the line between belief and delusion is not very wide. One day you are telling yourself that you believe in what you are building. The next day, you start feeling like the world has to respond because you have put too much of yourself into it. That is not a comfortable thing to admit, but I think some version of it happens to me. I start feeling like if I am giving this so much of my life, then it has to become something big.
This is also where I become more aggressive than I probably should. I don’t want to wait for things to happen naturally. I don’t want to sit around and hope that life will reward patience. I have started believing that sometimes you have to force movement. You have to create pressure. You have to push even when the system is not ready, even when people are slow, even when things are not perfect. Maybe this is brute force thinking, but honestly, it has helped me survive.
At the same time, I know this kind of thinking can make you difficult. It can make you impatient with people. It can make you impatient with yourself. It can make rest feel like weakness and softness feel like a problem. It can make you look at comfort with suspicion, like comfort is trying to make you average. That is a dangerous place to live in permanently, and I know that.
But I also cannot sit here and pretend this hunger is purely bad. This same restlessness has helped me build Banjaaran Studio. It has helped me show up on days when I did not know what else to do with myself. It has helped me turn pain into movement. So I don’t want to call ambition the villain. That would be dishonest. It has saved me in many ways.
I think what I am trying to understand is the source of it. If a part of my ambition comes from grief, I need to be honest about that. If a part of it comes from love, I need to respect that. If a part of it comes from ego, I need to keep that in check. And if a part of it comes from anger, I need to make sure I don’t let it turn me into someone I don’t recognize.
Maybe that is the real guilt. Not that I want too much, but that sometimes I don’t know where the wanting ends. I don’t know when ambition becomes obsession. I don’t know when drive becomes aggression. I don’t know when building something meaningful becomes using work to avoid sitting with myself. These are not clean questions, and I don’t have clean answers.
All I know is that after losing my mother, I became someone who does not feel like stopping. Some part of me does not even want to stop. I want to keep building. I want to make the most of what she gave me. I want to do something meaningful with the life I have. And if that makes me a little ruthless, a little unreasonable, and a little intense at times, I think I can accept that.
I just don’t want to become unaware of it. I don’t want to build something big and lose myself inside it. I don’t want brute force to become my only language. I want to keep the hunger, but I also want to understand it. Because maybe the point is not to stop being ambitious. Maybe the point is to know exactly what your ambition is doing to you while you are chasing everything you think you are meant to become.
Kveer, signing out.