kid nervous
Shavar Ross on flickr

Your answer to these questions may determine your success in life:
  1. What do you regard as your two most outstanding favorable qualities of personality or character?
  2. Do you have a definite purpose in life? Answer on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 11 (extremely).
Please answer before reading ahead...
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If you answered the first question with a quality related to ambition, and gave a high score for the second question, then you are probably going to have a successful life, according to a new study from Notre Dame University.

Professor Timothy Judge identified ambition in a sample of 717 high-intelligence individuals, tested over seven decades, through two questions asked to the subjects and two similar questions asked to their parents.

Judge found that “ambitious kids had higher educational attainment, attended highly esteemed universities, worked in more prestigious occupations and earned more."

This may seem obvious, but it contradicts an often negative social connotation of ambition:
Participants who were more ambitious did not appear to be made miserable or insatiable by their ambitions. Instead, we found that individuals who were more ambitious had higher levels of attainment in both educational and work domains. This success, in turn, was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and longevity (though the links from ambition to life satisfaction and longevity were quite weak). These results indicate that ambition—at least as operationalized here—does not create a feeling of unquenchable desire for unattainable outcomes.

While ambition leads to success, it does not lead to significantly higher satisfaction or longevity.