Wanting a big life is easy. Wanting the Tuesday afternoons that build it is the rare part.

Everybody wants the summary and hardly anybody wants the raw material. The large version of a life is pleasant to imagine and costs nothing, while it gets built out of specific unremarkable afternoons, most of them slightly boring and none of them feeling significant from inside. The rare thing is not the ambition. It is being willing to want what the ambition is actually made of.

Which makes the real test what you do with a free Tuesday afternoon, repeatedly, when nothing is due. Decide what you would do with one, then do that this week. That is the whole ambition in the only form it comes in.