Your values should remain recognizable after ambition arrives.

Ambition tends to reorganise a life around itself, and values are the first thing to be quietly re-ranked. It happens with good justification each time: this season is unusual, this push is temporary, this is what it takes. Several years later the values are still deprioritised and the season never ended.

Name two or three things you want to still be true about you after you get what you are chasing. Then check periodically whether they are. This is not an argument against ambition, only a way of ensuring it does not spend things you never agreed to sell.