1880: The Cost of Ambition: Affording Goals Without Burnout

So Money with Farnoosh Torabi

Farnoosh Torabi

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happens when ambition—the very quality that’s supposed to fuel our success—ends up making us sick?

My guest today, Amina AlTai, knows this firsthand. On a sweltering July morning in New York City, she got a call from her doctor that changed everything: if she didn’t head to the hospital immediately, she was just days away from multiple organ failure. The cause? Years of overwork and overstriving, rooted in her experience as the child of immigrants, navigating a post-9/11 workplace with an Arab name, and feeling she had to be the hardest working person in the room to matter.

That wake-up call set Amina on a journey of healing and reinvention, eventually becoming an executive coach to senior leaders and women around the world. From her work and her own life, she’s come to see that ambition isn’t the enemy—but the way we relate to it can be. In her new book The Ambition Trap: How to Stop Chasing and Start Living, she introduces us to two kinds of ambition: the painful kind, driven by wounds like rejection or injustice, and the purposeful kind, rooted in truth and wholeness.

We’ll talk about how to spot the difference, how to break free from the “painful ambition” that leaves us exhausted and disconnected, and what it looks like to redirect that drive in ways that nourish us, support our communities, and bring lasting fulfillment.

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Transcript

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1:02.2	So Money Episode 1880, The Cost of Ambition, How to Afford Our Goals without burning out.
1:10.6	You're listening to So Money with award-winning money guru Farnush Karabi.
1:15.4	Each day, get a 30-minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds,
1:20.7	authors, influencers, and from Farnoose yourself.
1:24.7	Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons? Sorry. You're in the wrong
1:30.0	place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to So Money. We're told to
1:37.7	speak truth to power. We're told to throw our hat in the ring. And then when we do those things,
1:41.9	we're told that's inconvenient and that doesn't work and you're
1:44.2	unlikable. And so then we try to outwork this broken system. And then that's partly where we fall in the
1:48.9	trap, right? And so there's a systemic piece that we have to talk about. And then a lot of us
1:54.1	internalize that bias. And then it becomes a mindset piece as well. So my book has split into those
1:58.7	two parts of talking about the systems, but also
	...

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