Hey, it's John Favreau. This week Offline's crew is offline. Gotta hate that joke.

We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, I'm excited to share one of my favorite recent

episodes of Cricket's podcast work appropriate, hosted by Anne Helen Peterson.

In this episode, Anne, along with guest Rainesford Stofur,

responds to listener-submitted questions about real-life issues

stemming from too much ambition at work. Then, to top it off,

they get into how ambition can be used as a positive force outside of work.

Like what you hear, be sure to check out new episodes of Work Appropriate every week,

or ever you get your podcasts. Okay, let's get into the episode now.

Hi everyone, I'm Anne Helen Peterson and this is Work Appropriate.

Last month, I was back at my childhood home, waiting through piles of saved artifacts from my

junior high and high school years. And for complicated reasons, my junior high went through

ninth grade, which meant that ninth grade was also like this pseudo moment of graduation.

It was a big deal. We had this formal dance with the other junior high and more importantly,

we had a grade wide vote for class superlatives.

Now, this was small town Idaho in the mid-90s and some of these categories were things like

best-looking. I still remember who won best-looking, but there was also a category for most ambitious.

The person who won this award was a close friend of mine and the reason he won it wasn't because

he had like a five-point business plan. It was because he had a very clear plan for becoming

a professional basketball player. A kid in Idaho in ninth grade, pretty good, but you know,

not like LeBron James in ninth grade good. Telling everyone he was absolutely going to the NBA

and to a group of 14-year-olds that was legible as ambition. It was big and bombastic, brash.

...