In Chapter 10 of 19 in his 2011 Capture Your Flag interview, community builder and entrepreneur Fabian Pfortmüller shares what he has learned about the value of ambition and its role shaping aspirations. Over time, Fabian learns to embrace ambition and its intended outcomes to better understand his own aspirational path to working with others to create positive change. Pfortmüller is co-founder of Sandbox Network (www.sandbox-network.com). He also co-founded an innovation think tank, Incubaker (www.incubaker.com), and is part of the group's first spin-off, Holstee (www.holstee.com), an apparel brand for people who would like to wear their passion. Pfortmüller graduated from Columbia University and its School of General Studies.
Transcript:
Erik Michielsen: How has your aspiration changed as you’ve gotten older?
Fabian Pfortmüller: I hope I know better who I am and what I want over time and one of the things that I realizes is what I do actually doesn’t matter that much as long as I can be in control of things and can kind of design my own life and at the same time also work with the people that I really love.
And that has changed because at the beginning I would say my aspiration over time has shaped my ambition and at the beginning I was very ambitious and very driven to do something but there wasn’t much beyond being ambitious and I didn’t know why to be ambitious and now I think I start to slowly recognize why it’s worthwhile to be ambitious, it’s worthwhile to be ambitious to be surrounded by beautiful people and work with them. It’s worthwhile to be ambitious to realize ideas and it’s worthwhile to create something because someone else is going to profit from that, you can actually create value in it. And so as I get older I hopefully start to better understand the why of things and why I do stuff.