Ambition is really just a creative impulse that has caught your fancy. A vision of a reality you want to create arises, and you set out to manifest it. There is nothing wrong or limiting about this. Creativity is part of your being.

This irks some meditators when I say this: the quest for inner emptiness is an ambitious creative activity. A person becomes aware of how they feel and think in the present (their supposed suffering), and conceive a vision of changing their reality. They want to become empty, because some individual who self-professes to be empty has convinced them that this is the highest state one can be in and that will make them happy and peaceful inside. So they form an ambition, a vision of being Buddha-like, and set out to create it by meditating, reading books, watching videos, attending seminars, or maybe even becoming a monk. They form their experiences in the same way someone builds a business, or how Michelangelo made The David or The Pieta or his career as an artist, or how two people create a family. It's all creativity.

Meditation is a creative tool. People use it to create something else. I've used it to create a different reality.

I suggest you not get hung-up on these beliefs about ambition. Surely, you can choose between the any-means-to-an-end route and create without compassion and consideration for other beings, or you can create your visions with it. But you can't ever escape having ideas, desire, creative impulses, and action. Without them, you'd be an inert blob of matter, like a person in a coma. You're alive. You're a creator. Paint on the canvass of life. It's the greatest medium of them all.