There is a rare kind of ambition that frightens even the one who carries it. The kind that wakes you at 3:16 a.m., eyes wide, heart pounding. You can mistake it for anxiety. But the thought of not chasing it feels like a betrayal. This is the passion that makes time elastic. Hours vanish without notice. Hunger, fatigue and doubt are reduced to background noise. You become unpredictable, even to yourself, saying yes to the unthinkable. It’s the all-consuming fire within, that even you can’t quite believe the lengths you’re willing to go.
It’s not pretty. It’s not balanced. But it’s alive in a way nothing else is.
Every story that shifts the ground beneath us, whether in art, sport, business or love, comes from this furnace. The idea isn’t new, but neither is the fire.
The Wright brothers thought humans should fly. The world thought they were mad until they lifted off the sands of Kitty Hawk.
Gandhi marched to the sea for salt, unwittingly setting an empire on the path to dissolution.
Picasso returning to the same canvas, refusing to declare it finished.
Beyoncé rehearsing until her toenails fall off for Renaissance.
Greta Thunberg sitting alone with a cardboard sign till the whole world noticed.
The filmmaker burning through 14 drafts of a script until the characters begin to breathe on their own.
The chaiwala rewriting his fate and rebranded himself as a global statesman.
You can't call it ambition anymore. Ambition is a polite word. This is a form of madness, a holy delusion.
The belief that the extraordinary might still happen. A place where ordinary effort cannot survive. Where the world changes you before you change the world.
And surrender is frightening.
To give yourself over to this thing means killing off the safe version of you. It means losing the comfort of mediocrity. It means risking embarrassment, bankruptcy, heartbreak. It means letting go of the illusion that you are in control.
But here’s the secret, that shock you feel at your own capacity is proof you’ve stepped beyond the limits you didn’t know you had.
From the moment you can clutch a pencil without skewering your own nostril, you are told to work hard, be patient, follow the rules, wait your turn. Life is a fair judge. Success is a meritocratic fairytale available to anyone willing to suffer attractively. One day you will be handed success. You have earned it.
Yeah. No.
The world is neither that generous nor that sentimental. How charmingly proletarian that would be, though.
It rewards the most convinced. Often loud, occasionally delusional and always unrelenting. The delicious, unreasonable belief that the rules don’t apply to you. That your life might be the exception. That while the odds are stacked, you were born to tilt them, and tilt them with flair.
The respectable grind is noble. Cute, even. Like crocheting. Or sourdough baking. Conviction, on the other hand, is magnetic. It can be deeply uncomfortable. It will wreck your sleep, gut your weekends, make you skip meals and keep going when the rational choice would be to quit. It’s the invisible engine behind every revolutionary, every outlier, every “overnight” success that took a decade.
Take the visceral theatre of Formula 1, for example. To the casual observer, it’s billion-dollar teams, champagne podiums, impossibly photogenic men paid obscene sums to flirt with death. But if you really watch, right before the lights go out, there’s a stillness. A flicker of something feral behind every visor.
In that blink, you see the truth. It’s either winning or burning in the attempt.
It is never about the money.
Wealth is one thing. Chasing greatness is another. And real, incandescent greatness is never pragmatic or safe.
It can be lonely. It is sometimes humiliating. And the higher your standards, the lonelier the road. But there’s an austere beauty to it. The conversations you do have are sharper, the projects you take on are richer, the love you accept is deeper.
Lowering the bar won’t feed your soul. But when you do meet someone, or something, that meets you at your height, it’s electric.
This quality, worshipped as “vision” when it works, is just as quickly dismissed as “madness” when it fails. It’s the same fever dream. The same sacred folly.
I’ve learnt that failure isn’t a dead end. And when it comes, as it always does, you don’t just sit there licking your wounds. You rise again. Because you are faithful to the possibility. Because there’s still a seed in the soil you refuse to abandon.
There’s no seducing success with polite patience. You can’t coax a butterfly to your shoulder. You can’t manifest your way into love that feels like home.
You can only tend to your garden, every single day. Until it becomes so irresistible, so rooted, so defiantly alive, butterflies want to land on it. And they will.
So no, dear reader, your time will not arrive simply because you bled silently into your keyboard for fifteen years. The gates of triumph will not swing open for the patient. But they will for the ones who bang on them so long, so loud, with conviction so potent, that the guards let them in just to shut them up.
Junoon ho toh aisa, khudi bhi hairaan ho jaaye.
Let the passion be such that even the self is left astounded.
Because to live any other way would feel like a half-life.
The author is a Mumbai-based producer and actor