July 2026
A couple days ago, I was mindlessly scrolling through TikTok when I came across a very interesting concept. I saw a tiktok about the link between trauma and ambition, a connection I'd never considered before. I'm not a scientist or anything close, this is just what I researched after seeing that and my personal experience.
After digging into the research, I found out this is just not a random bullshit tiktok claim. There is a study done in which ~ 400 extraordinarily high achievers were surveyed and close to 75% of them had serious childhood trauma. Anything from a lost parent to grief. The way tv shows and movies make it seem is that special people are just born special. It's interesting how in reality it is the exact opposite. Turns out the drive that looks like confidence is often just a survival response that looks nice. Talk about putting a bow tie on a pig.
When you grow up around something unpredictable or unsafe, your nervous system rewires to stay on. Always scanning and always trying to get ahead of the next bad thing. The hypervigilance doesn't go away when the danger does, it just redirects where it points. For a lot of people it points to a bottle or a joint or maybe something stronger and then for some people it points to a company or high achieving. It's the same engine, just a different direction. It's interesting that after a trauma the person who can't stop drinking and the person who can't stop working are running the same program, just using different tools.
Dopamine is the chemical reaction that everyone believes is about pleasure, however it's not. According to research done by Robert Sapolsky, dopamine spikes while you're chasing the reward and drops the second you get it. And the spike is harder when the reward isn't guaranteed.
So the wins don't work. You grind for something, you tell yourself that when you get it you'll be happy and it will feel so much better. When it actually comes your brain has already moved the goalpost. This is called the arrival fallacy, you arrive and the place is empty so you leave and chase the next one.
The interesting thing is if your drive came from somewhere dark, then the win or winning was never really about winning itself. It was about feeling better. It was about feeling safe. It's a way to feel okay inside a body that's been braced since childhood.
My dad's brother, my uncle, had colorectal cancer. He fought it for a little under a year. If you've ever watched someone go through that battle, I don't really have the words for it. It was brutal. Thinking about that battle still is. The kind of pain that doesn't stop, that takes a person apart slowly while everyone around them is watching and pretending to be strong.
In an earlier post I wrote that he "did a first class job of showing us what real fight was." I think that was as much as I could handle saying back then.
In all honesty he was a hardass, but not in a negative way. He saw the best in all of us kids even when all we did was play Fortnite and fail school. He knew we could do more.
Then he died.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you all that ambition comes from grief. I think that's too clean and probably not even true. Plenty of very driven people have decent childhoods. But I know for me and my cousin, this was the trigger.
Except it didn't flip on right away. First it pointed to the complete other direction. For about a year I smoked every day. Not to have fun. I smoked when I woke up. I smoked before sleeping. Hell, I used to pregame in my shower.
I don't have an addiction now. I don't believe I ever did. I don't smoke now. I'm not writing this from inside, I'm writing it from the other side, where I can finally see what it was about. It was never about the weed. The weed was just a tool. The same engine from the research, just pointed at something negative instead of positive.
And here's where my life lines up with science a little too well. I didn't get out of that by feeling better. I got out by finding something else to point the engine at. I started working and building. The same restlessness had me attempt to build a startup at 19. I didn't heal anything, I just gave it something positive to look at.
My dad is different. He never needed a trigger.
He's always had it. The drive was in him long before any of this. My dad and his friends built a company, took the leap of faith when they had families and rent on the line, and eventually got it acquired by Google. He had the engine his whole life. Grief didn't create his ambition. It just gave it somewhere to go.
When my uncle died, my dad began a journey of grief that I don't have the right to describe. That's his brother, his best friend. That's a loss on a level I haven't had to know. And what he did after that was so him. He built. Within the year after his loss, he founded another company. He took the worst year of his life and channeled it straight into making something new.
I watch him do it and I honestly have no idea what I'm looking at. Part of me thinks it's beautiful. That a man can take that much pain and pour it into something that makes things, hires people, and outlasts him. He didn't drift like I did. He didn't go looking for a floor over a hole. He picked up the pain and put it to work, because that's what he's always done with everything.
That's the difference and it's what I want to grow into. For me the grief was a switch. A trigger. For him it was fuel he already knew how to burn. He's not running from anything or hiding from his feelings. He's just doing the thing he's best at with something heavy, which turns into something that lasts.
My cousin is my uncle's son. We're not really cousins though, we're brothers.
He's lost the most out of anyone. I lost a second father. He lost his first. There's no comparing those and I'm never going to pretend there is.
And here's what he did with it. He quit smoking. He lost 50 pounds. He started a clothing brand and now he is building his own startup. He's won every single hackathon he has been to. He took one of the worst things that can happen to a person at 17 and turned his whole life around, while carrying more than any of us. That's not someone who's running from something, that's a kid who looked at the pain and got to work.
The part that gets me most, he takes care of his 7yr old brother like that's his son. He stepped into a hole that should never have to be filled by someone that young, and he filled it without making it a thing.
If you want proof of everything I've been saying about grief and drive, he's it. I doubt he would say that the two correlate. However, if the shoe fits the shoe fits.
So no, I don't think ambition is just grief in a costume. I think that's the kind of thing that sounds deep but I think it falls apart. Some people are just built for it. My dad is one of them.
But I do think grief can be a trigger. I think for me and my cousin, it was. I think there's a version of us that stays drifting, stays smoking, and I think the only reason that that version of me is not writing this is that something happened that was heavy enough to flip the switch. That's not a nice thing to know about yourself. That your favorite quality about yourself might be built out of the worst thing you have had to experience.
If I could talk to him I'd ask him one thing, and I already know he wouldn't answer it the way I want. I'd ask if he wanted us ambitious because it was good for us, or because it was the only thing he knew how to want for the people he loved.
Because I do it too now. When I care about someone, I want them to go hard. I want them to build. I hand the same thing down without even thinking about it.
I can't tell anymore if this drive is a gift he gave me or a hole he left in me. Maybe it's both. Maybe that's the real thing he passed down, not the ambition, but never being able to tell the difference.