In this episode of Inside Strategic Coach, host Shannon Waller interviews Dan Sullivan about a re‑imagined view of ambition. Dan shares how, after turning 80, he reframed ambition from a fixed destination or a competitive status symbol into a "capability" – a platform that fuels the development of all other capabilities. He critiques the common "gas‑tank" metaphor that suggests people are born with a set amount of ambition, and instead likens ambition to a muscle that grows stronger with use. Dan introduces the 4C progression (Commitment, Courage, Capability, Confidence) as the engine that expands ambition: you commit to a new capability, summon courage to work on it, acquire the capability, and then gain confidence, which in turn boosts ambition. The conversation also addresses gendered narratives around ambition, noting that women often feel they must justify their ambition while men must justify its absence, and argues that redefining ambition as a universal capability can dissolve these biases. Practical guidance is offered: focus on the next capability you want to develop, follow the 4C steps, and view ambition as the by‑product of capability growth rather than a goal itself. The dialogue emphasizes collaboration, creativity, and the idea that ambition is abundant, not a zero‑sum game, and that it can be cultivated at any age.
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Hi, Shannon Waller here and welcome to Inside Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. Dan, we've been talking a lot about ambition and you have a great saying. You say ambition is the capability for all other capabilities. And I know it's kind of a newer thought for me. I'm used to thinking about ambition as a destination, as something to achieve. But you're actually talking about ambition as a capability. Help me understand that more.
Yeah, well, first of all, I've always been ambitious, but I didn't have a real keen interest in examining ambition until I got to around 70. I was 7010 years ago, 11 years ago. Where it really became clear was on my 80th birthday. So we had a really great big first time ever Strategic Coach conference in Nashville, Tennessee. And there were many, many entrepreneurs there who had been in strateg for as much as 15 or 20 years, but I had never met them and I had never coached them. So it was an enjoyable two days for me because I just got to meet people who had been in the program using the tools. But because we have great associate coaches, they had proceeded over 15 or 20 year periods. And they came up and talked to me and I remember one person I met and he said, you're at 80, says, what's your biggest ambition for when you're 90? I think I had been thinking about this particular thing and, you know, what keeps you going to a certain extent? Why are you still doing this? I said, my greatest ambition for when I'm 90 is that I'm more ambitious than I am at 80. And they said, well, ambitious about what? And I said, whatever I happened to be working on at that time. And it opened a door for me to think about ambition as something different than a destination. And over the past year I've been giving a lot of thought to it. And actually, as you mentioned at the start of our podcast here, one of our quarterly books is called Always More Ambitious. And I think it's a fundamental breakthrough in thinking about this that first of all, let's just talk about ambition as a capability. And I think this is a troublesome concept. I think ambition, it's used to describe sort of a competitive factor in society. Well, this person's more ambitious than that person. Or you have two ambitious people and they're really competing with each other. And my sense is that none of the education that people go through, either informal education, growing up at home, or education in the formal educational system wants to deal with this particular subject. And I think the reason is that people are very alone. They're very isolated with this whole notion of ambition. First of all, I can never remember being in an open conversation either socially or in business, where anybody really wanted to talk about ambition openly. Openly? Yeah, nobody wanted to talk about it openly because it seems that there's great inequality. And the other thing is that I think that it's been used to describe a lot of negative qualities about people. You know, that he doesn't care about anything except his ambition. You know, he's. Or she. She'll walk over you for her ambition. And it's presented as a sort of a distasteful thing. And I said, I think we're misunderstanding what this actually is. But there's an image that I think most people use to describe what their ambition is. And it's kind of like a gas tank. And people are born and given different size ambition gas tanks. Okay, first of all, that he has a little ambition gas tank. But that person over there, they have a really big ambition gas tank. And you're given that gas tank and then it's filled up with a certain amount of ambition gas, okay? But it's never refilled the gas tank. And so some people, their ambition gas tank runs out at 15, runs out at 25, runs out at 40, 50, 60. And then there's some people, they were just given a colossal ambition gas tank. And I said, I think this way of looking at it, one is, I think it's false. But the other thing is it doesn't do you any good. It's not a thought that has any use to it, you know, And I think it makes you unhappy. So what I say is, I think ambition is the capability that gives rise to all other capabilities. In other words, to the degree that you become a really good writer, is because you have an ambition to use writing to move forward. And you can take any other capability and say, where's the desire for this capability that gets you started? Because it takes work, you know, you have to be committed to it. We have a 4C's progression in strategic coach that to develop any new capability, first of all, you have to be committed to doing it. It's a future. You have a future picture of yourself operating with much greater capability. There's a period of courage where you're committing to it and you're putting the work in, but you don't have the capability yet. Then you get the capability, and then there's a big jump in confidence because you now have this capability which allows you to commit to further capabilities. But I say, where's the electricity come from for this whole thing. Where's the spark come from? And I think that ambition is the platform capability that generates all other capabilities.
So it can grow, it can change this fuel. The gas does not have to be depleted. It can keep expanding.
Well, it's like a muscle. The better image is that it's a muscle. And we know that muscle gets stronger with use. So what I think happens is that you want to have a new capability and you go out and you create the new capability. Well, part of the payoff for the capability is that it comes back and makes you more ambitious. So it's a closed loop system. So I think it changes things in a very significant way if you realize that every time you want to become more capable and it's very specific and you pull it off, that you now have the use of this capability, but that you've also just strengthened your general platform of being ambitious. And so, at 81, I'm just extraordinarily ambitious, but I'm not ambitious for anything. I'm ambitious for the sake that my ambition platform just gets stronger and stronger as I go forward.
And Dan, the way I can connect this in our bigger future exercise, talk about, you know, it's almost like be ambitious to have a greater capability, because as you said then, that spurs off greater ambition. And basing it on capability rather than some big somewhat looks like unattainable thing to accomplish. Having a capability is enormously exciting. So my first ambition, to be a good webinar host, to be a podcast partner. Well, to do my own podcast with my.
To write books.
To write books, create programs, to be a better speaker, you know, so those are capabilities. And once you get the capability, you're.
Like, oh, also your ambition gets larger. Your ambitiousness gets larger.
Yes. And it's fun, it's exciting, and it doesn't feel to bring in our concept of the gap doesn't feel unrealistic. It doesn't feel harder. It just feels like more possibilities are opening up, which is another word for ambition.
But I just want to talk a little bit about the negative side of not seeing ambitious this way. Okay. One of the things I've noticed. So I've been coaching entrepreneurs since 1974, and it's also been a period where more and more women are getting involved in entrepreneurship. And one of the things that I've noticed that there's a uniquely different way of looking at male entrepreneurs who are ambitious and female entrepreneurs who are ambitious. And I think one of the reasons why I want to Change the notion of what ambition is. I think it's a burden for women because I'll just say it outright, that when it comes to women, they have to justify why they're ambitious. And I think men have to justify why they don't have any ambition. It was that way in the 1970s and it's that way 50 years later. And I said, if we change what ambition actually means, we get rid of that. It's a human thing. It's not male or female. I'm against being manipulated. And I think that all human beings have this capability of being ambitious. But it's important that they understand that ambition is not a destination. As you say, it's not a getting to someplace. It's actually a growing capability to get anywhere.
This may sound something, but it's like a becoming. Yeah, you get to a new.
It's an activity.
Yeah. It's a new state of being. It's exciting. And the other thing, and I wrote this down a minute ago, Dan, the old way of looking at ambition is, you know, the kind of cutthroat, negative behaviors. That's assuming it's a zero sum game. And the way you're talking about it, it's incredibly abundant and there's lots for everybody. And just because I'm ambitious doesn't take anything away from your ambition. If anything, it can support one another and we can figure out if there's any teamwork or collaboration with it.
Yeah, I think the problem with the other way of looking, the negative way of looking at ambition, it's getting your way. It's sort of getting my way. And it's depicted as overpowering someone else. It's depicting as not letting anything stop you. And I said, but it sees you as an isolated individual. And not only that, but the more ambitious you become, the more isolated you become for other people. But that's seeing it as a destination and a zero sum game. But if you look at ambition as just a platform, so it's a platform capability, and it's the platform capability that allows you to create all other capabilities, which it would include also massive teamwork with other people, massive creativity with other people, massive collaboration with other people, where your ambition actually empowers other people's ambition, then it becomes a totally different thing. And it's not age related and it's not gender related, clearly.
I like, Dan, that we're writing always more ambitious when you're 81. How cool is that? And it was interesting listening to some clients talk yesterday. And you weren't actually within hearing it was just how inspiring this mindset is to see you and what you're up to and what you're excited about and how you yourself are focused on becoming more capable and expanding your ambitions. They're like, whoa, this is exciting. But it's important to be around a positive. I don't love the term role model, but a positive model of someone who is doing it well and doing it in a way that is, as you said, massive teamwork, creativity and collaboration. That's a whole different picture than what most people have. Yeah.
Can I ask you from your standpoint, because you've always struck me as being ambitious, but what does this fine tuning do for me?
It's validating. I don't feel like I have to justify my ambition as a woman, which is I don't like justifying, so that actually really suits me. Well, the other thing, for me, it gives me enormous direction, Daniel, that all I need to do is focus on what's my next level of capability, that is my next ambition. And that, to me, is fun. And pursuant to our last podcast, actually, it's going to be more in the area of my unique ability. So being coached by you in the Free Zone workshops last week and this week is like, oh, my future is straight creativity. That's what I'm excited about doing. Creativity, health, and the benefits from that. So that feels like a clear path. It doesn't feel like there are huge obstacles. There's great opportunities for teamwork and collaboration, as we talked about, creativity. So for me, it's just a fun future. And fun for me is a technical term. It's not a frivolous one. So for me, it's exciting, one that's very validating, and it's also endless. So to your point, I don't see any age restriction on that. Why would I want to stop if someone wanted to kind of switch their brain on this, Especially someone who perhaps sees themselves as being that other version of ambitious. If they want to look at ambition instead as a capability, what are some steps they can do? Reflections, things that they can do in the future that can kind of set this mindset for them?
I don't think I would focus on ambition. I think I would focus on what's the next capability you want to develop. Because my sense is to change your thinking about something, you have to have some specific growth project where you experience the growth. And one is you're going to be committed to it before it's possible. All growth starts by having something in mind that's you performing at a higher level. And then there's going to be a period where you're going to have to be courageous with this because the work has to go in before the result becomes apparent. And then when the capability emerges and you're good at the capability, this is where I bring in the ambition that by having this greater capability, you just became more ambitious. Okay? So that ambition doesn't require that you be looking at it all the time. All it requires is that you be gaining new capability. That's all that's required. And then just realize that when you have the new capability, you have all the rewards that come with that, but you also have the reward. You're now capable of being more ambitious.
And it's so simple, dan. It's the four Cs. So commitment, courage, capability, and confidence to do it all over again, which is what we love to do. And it's great because I think then all the opportunities, all the negative aspects of it tend to fall away because hopefully you're wanting to make a commitment to something that you find personally it's your ambition for yourself, not someone else's ambition for you.
And I would like to suggest that your feeling of greater confidence is actually greater ambition.
I like it. I like it. Great. Thank you so much, Dan.
