Sustainable Ambition
How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work
A blueprint for the balanced pursuit of personal and professional fulfillment, Sustainable Ambition is a motivating self-help guide.
Life coach Kathy Oneto’s strategic self-help book Sustainable Ambition is about achieving work-life balance and finding success on one’s own terms.
Drawing on academic research and podcast interviews, the self-improvement method introduced here is designed to support one’s professional and personal goals while prioritizing work-life balance and preventing burnout. It involves determining which goals matter, deciding the best time to pursue said goals, and assessing one’s available energy in order to hone focus and begin living with intention. The certainty that one “can find greater fulfillment and joy across [one’s] life and work with more ease and less angst” undergirds all of the book’s recommendations.
Tips, exercises, and tools for embodying the book’s mindset are included throughout the book. Further, an array of obstacles are imagined, with advice for navigating each, as around the emotions surrounding ambition, the loss of ambition, and tension between one’s professional and personal ambitions. The book gets some mileage out of redefining the notion of work-life balance itself, proposing the pursuit of “life and work integration” instead; it asserts that success is about more than status, and ambition about more than just professional matters.
The encouraging prose combines general reassurances, such as “Yes, you are allowed life ambitions!” with tough-love motivational claims like “Busy is a choice.” Client stories and lessons from other self-help texts are used to further illustrate its points. Its exercises are extensive and purposeful, building upon one another to prompt self-reflection and intentional planning, and its visual tools, as with a two-by-two matrix designed to help determine how required efforts and personal capacities align, are effective.
However, the book’s length and redundancy dilute its core message. Further, its personal anecdotes are low stakes and underdeveloped, as with its coverage of youthful adventures in New York City and a conflict between becoming a tour guide or joining a yearbook committee. Stories about solo adventures in London, work at a startup, and triathlete pursuits hold interest without complementing the book’s points in full. And the book’s conclusion hinges on quotes and themes from a popular television show, with its final words representing a marked departure from its established structure and style.
Still, Sustainable Ambition is an upbeat self-help guide that prompts its audience to take ownership of their personal and professional aspirations.
Reviewed by
Hannah Pearson
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
