We label them lazy. Unmotivated. Entitled.
The younger generation on our teams doesn’t work the way we did. They don’t hustle the same hours. They don’t chase the same carrots.
So we shake our heads and wonder where the ambition went.
But here’s the thing: their aspirations didn’t disappear. They evolved. And they should have.
These are different times. The challenges they face aren’t easier than what we encountered; they’re just different. A generation carrying student debt we never imagined. Navigating a gig economy that didn’t exist in our day. Building careers in a world where job security is a relic and the future of work is being rewritten in real-time.
They’re not lesser than us. They’re adapting to a reality we didn’t have to face.
In The Defining Decade, clinical psychologist Meg Jay busts a crucial myth: your twenties aren’t a warm-up for “real life.” They’re the decade for building “identity capital” – the skills, experiences, and relationships that become the foundation for everything that follows.
When Jay revised her book in 2021, she addressed the unique pressures facing today’s twentysomethings. Different pressures. Different paths. Different definitions of success.
For those of us who lead and mentor, the question isn’t whether they have ambition. It’s whether we’re willing to see their ambition for what it is, rather than measuring it against a yardstick from a different era.
How we see them shapes their trajectory. More importantly, it shapes the future of our organizations.
Perhaps the real question is this: Are we stuck in our definition of ambition, or are we willing to expand it?
