You've been told to not do this

“Too much ambition” has always been attached to women who reach for more. This past weekend, as you know, the nation elected the first female, Black, and Indian American vice president of the United States. Of course, she’s been described as ambitious, as if it were a disease. But ambition is how we step into who we are and how we reach our fullest potential. Ambition is a key factor in reaching success as women, regardless of what success might mean for each of us.

I decided to go to law school when I was a junior in college in 1973. I bought the LSAT Prep Book with trembling hands; it seemed a momentous thing to do at the time. But I wouldn't enter law school until 1977 after working as a clerk typist and paralegal at a midtown Manhattan law firm. During that time I also volunteered at Legal Aid in East Harlem and at a 24-hour crisis center. All of these experiences helped me get into a law school I wouldn't have been qualified to enter based on my grades and LSAT score alone.

I decided to lean in for multiple reasons, not all of them laudable. I'd been working at a radical feminist women's center during my junior and senior years in college and decided I wanted to build wealth. It felt like selling out, but on the other hand, I didn't want to follow the path my mother had mapped out for me—to become a teacher or a secretary so I'd "have something to fall back on" in case the husband forecasted for me died or left me.

My ambition was to rise above what I believed at the time to be a low station in life. I needed to prove to myself that I could do what was still seen as a man's job, and I wanted to have economic stability so I'd never have to worry about having a man die or leave me.

I went to law school and practiced civil litigation for 25 years. Then I went back to school to get a legal Master's degree in conflict resolution, started a mediation/arbitration practice and launched a blog about negotiation. I eventually found my bliss in training women how to negotiate and in consulting with high-potential and high-achieving women to help them close their wage and leadership gaps.

How can anyone say how their life changed by making scary choices? Would I be a secretary? Would I have married a successful man and had children? Would I have become a journalist struggling to make a living? My life is good because I never gave up trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. It’s good because of the privileges I have been afforded. And it’s good because I was ambitious. 

So, go out there and be ambitious, because you deserve to have what fulfills you. Ambition will help you find success. Go get ‘em.