In defence of wanting to be great

Why Timothée Chalamet’s radical ambition unsettles us, and the necessary delusions behind the pursuit of mastery

I’m interested in (and late to writing about) the reactions to Timothée Chalamet’s brazen “pursuit of greatness”. The actor has openly admitted to this basic extreme motivation behind what he does in multiple forums. After becoming the youngest ever actor to win the SAG awards for A Complete Unknown, in which he played Bob Dylan, Chalamet chooses the not “classiest” route and gushes about how much the milestone means to him, how much effort went into the role.

He goes on from this affable modesty, mousy moustache on baby face and all, to declaring he wants to be “one of the greats”, that he’s “as inspired by Daniel Day Lewis and Marlon Brando and Viola Davis” as he is by “Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps”. And “the greats here tonight”, he adds, careful to not put himself above his competitors or the other members of Hollywood at the ceremony.

This is so anti-classic-award-speech behaviour that Chalamet would obviously go down in history for it. Instead of being “humbled”, he chooses to be real, earnest, and tactfully defiant.

Chalamet is aware that displays of ambition are most appropriate when subtle, modest, especially coming from the already talented and successful. We like ambition so long as its extent is suitably disguised. When it is large and monstrous, groupthink would rather shame it, probably from an evolutionary strategy to maintain cohesion.

We are conditioned—and wired—not to make others uncomfortable. Proclaiming you belong, or even want to belong (which is the same thing), to what the group considers a superior tier of existence triggers the group’s unconscious ceiling of what they can want and have, much less openly. Hence the “humblebrug” and the theatre games we see on LinkedIn, where people give away their cravings for recognition alongside dollops of pretentious modesty.

It is more honest—useful—humble—to be like Chalamet, I think, to have an approach to ambition that does not sugarcoat the (arguably selfish) hunger beneath it. We have come far enough as a society to see through anything less. It is authentic to admit how much you want to excel at something and to be seen for that excellence too, not necessarily out of some desire for the greater good, but for the sake of craft, for devotion, for leaving a mark on the way something is done, for the meaning that such audacity and delusion can provide your existence.

We live in the era of the personal brand and constant self-mythologization, goddamnit. You know what I’m talking about.

As someone who experiences this kind of maniacal commitment to getting to the ‘top’ in most of what I do, whether it’s being a ‘serious’ fitness enthusiast or an ‘excellent’ writer or an ‘A’ player at work or now a ‘pro’ poker player, Chalamet’s words feel like a cool splash of water on the face. (To elaborate, I don’t necessarily want to make a living from poker, but I do want my gameplay to be as good as the best. Whenever I sense such proficiency is not impossible, as I did with, say, quizzing or biology or certain musical instruments, I kind of lose interest and stop showing up.)

For the first half of my life, I was vulnerable to other people’s definitions of ‘top’. Intelligence was ‘real’ if proven in math, science, national competitive exams, various extracurriculars, whatever my parents wanted and were my own mimetic ideas of ‘cool’, as I write in the book. The intensity always came through—I couldn’t just be another clueless engineer out of college, I had to teach myself coding and get into FAANG. At B-school, the only way to alleviate suffering was to aim for ‘best’ at things I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do. I didn’t just do one Vipassana course and write a tweet thread about it, I did three and have tried to do it every day since. You see where I’m going with this.

I really need to know what I’m about in whatever I’m about. I can’t do things simply casually.

Perhaps this drive sounds admirable and aspirational, but you should know the trade-offs. I feel intense shame and embarrassment when I don’t check a box in the many boxes that can be checked on the way to a broad destination. For example, I could be an author with a physical book out in stores and online, I could have been validated by some of the greats, I have an audience that appreciates me, but my book is not yet international, I should have more followers, it took me all of this long-form and essay writing to feel like a ‘serious’ writer who also deserves to write Substacks. I may have a VO2 max above 45, my resting heart rate is less than 60, but I have some loose skin and extra kilograms on my arms, hips, stomach, thighs. I started playing poker five months ago, and I’ve been practicing my way up to playing at ten times the stakes I began with; I am, as we speak, neatly in profit, which is a high I’m purposely going to take some time to recover from, lest I succumb to climbing this ladder too.

I find, even in the second half of my life, where I am relatively free from childhood conditioning (but not totally immune to influence, or my own nature as a human being, I guess) the urge to structure pursuits through staggered achievement is instinctive. Goal-orientation provides life a backbone, even if its marrow is susceptible to poisoning. I have to work against the cognitive distortion that is black-and-white-thinking, forcing myself to see situations and my place in them as neither irredeemable, nor great beyond question (which feels impossible to feel anyway), but, indeed, as a ladder with rungs on it, or a basket of balls, a few red, a few black, a few white, and X of an unknown colour and texture, so how many are left when I take a few out?

Go figure.

“Timothée Chalamet has an athlete mentality and film twitter hates that lol”, ventures one analysis. The comments dissect whether he’s great enough to declare he wants to be great, or whether elite athletes are not more humble than he is. But if you can look at ambition without conflating it with hubris, as just a tendency, a phenomenon, people’s reactions to Chalamet’s attitude seem like projections.

Wanting to be great does not mean you think you are great. I feel like I’ve experienced this kind of burning hunger as at once life-giving and also exacting and punishing. It means you want to devote your life to mastery, and, yes, you do believe you are capable of it, on some level, but you might be going around life trying to engineer evidence of it all the time, holding yourself to impossible standards, being excessively competitive, you may have some kind of neurodivergence and hypersensitivity too, but being this way and being honest about it doesn’t make you a bad person or necessarily conceited.

I think shaming people for their self-belief and self-enthusiasm is as archetypal as the drive for mastery itself, which has always involved self-delusion and personal myth-making. The layer of pretense we expect on top from ourselves and others is dishonest and tedious.

But I understand the reaction too. We cringe when we don’t buy in to someone’s vision of themselves, or if it’s outsized to what we see them as, or if they embody what we don’t give ourselves permission to—but nobody should care about all this. We only need one believer, if any, to deal with all the non-believers.