Amina AlTai grew up as the child of immigrants with a clear directive: keep your head down, work hard, and success will follow. She took that advice to heart. By her late 20s she had launched her own marketing agency and was ticking every traditional box of achievement.
Then her body forced a reckoning.
While driving to a client meeting, her doctor called: “If you don’t go to the hospital right now—instead of work—you’re days away from multiple organ failure.” Severe anemia had pushed her to the brink. Instead of turning the car around, Amina attended the meeting first.
She was later diagnosed with celiac disease and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis—both worsened by chronic exhaustion. “My workaholic tendencies and painful relationship to success were quite literally killing me,” she writes in her new book, *The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living*.
Now 41 and a leadership coach, Amina helps high-achievers trade self-destructive drive for sustainable, joyful ambition. Here’s the framework she teaches.
### Painful Ambition vs. Purposeful Ambition
Ambition itself isn’t the problem—it’s neutral and natural, Amina says. It’s simply “a desire for more life, a wish to grow, a wish to unfold.”
What matters is the root.
- **Painful ambition** is a voracious need to advance at any cost. It springs from a deep sense of “not-enoughness” and old emotional wounds (rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, or injustice). You chase external validation to soothe an internal ache that never quite heals. It’s a house of cards waiting to collapse.
- **Purposeful ambition** flows from wholeness. It’s fueled by the desire to create positive impact, not to prove your worth. People operating here collaborate generously, protect their well-being, set clear boundaries, and treat setbacks as data, not verdicts on their value.
The bridge between the two? Ruthless self-awareness. Amina has clients journal—without judgment—whenever they notice scarcity-driven thoughts or physical signs of burnout.
### Daily Practices That Keep Ambition Healthy
1. **Honor your energy**
Treat your physical, emotional, and mental energy as your most precious resource. Eat well, move, sleep, and protect time with people who refill you. In work terms, this might mean structuring your week around your natural peaks, taking walking breaks between calls, or blocking deep-focus hours that no one can touch.
2. **Stop moving the goalposts**
High-achievers often celebrate a win for five seconds before sprinting to the next mountain. That habit makes true satisfaction impossible. After any big milestone, Amina insists on a deliberate pause: rest, reflect, savor. Ask yourself:
- What worked?
- What did I love?
- What drained me?
- What would I do differently?
Only then do you choose the next summit.
The irony, Amina says, is that when we stop treating success as a bandage for unworthiness and start treating it as an expression of aliveness, we actually achieve more—and enjoy it while it’s happening.
“We don’t have to work ourselves into pain and suffering,” she says. “There’s another way to be ambitious—one that expands life instead of extracting it.”