This is an interesting question, in my experience: The sets of "most ambitious people I know" and "people who describe themselves as ambitious" seem to be entirely disjoint. The most ambitious people I know just go out and do things, rather than sitting around thinking (and talking) about how ambitious they are.
This may be a cultural thing -- self-describing as "ambitious" is the sort of thing which I find tends to happen thanks to high school career preparation programs (along with "organized", "reliable", and "good with people"), and it's entirely possible that those school programs are subtly different in the US than in Canada. However, I can't shake the feeling that there's a kernel of truth here.
This is an interesting question, in my experience: The sets of "most ambitious people I know" and "people who describe themselves as ambitious" seem to be entirely disjoint. The most ambitious people I know just go out and do things, rather than sitting around thinking (and talking) about how ambitious they are.
This may be a cultural thing -- self-describing as "ambitious" is the sort of thing which I find tends to happen thanks to high school career preparation programs (along with "organized", "reliable", and "good with people"), and it's entirely possible that those school programs are subtly different in the US than in Canada. However, I can't shake the feeling that there's a kernel of truth here.