The Will To Power:
Ambition is the common, less abstracted and more diluted term for will to power. But in simple terms, low ambition means low will to power, and high ambition means high will to power.
Will alone is defined as the intensity of desire and metaphysical ability to reality bend through unwavering persistence, endurance and obsession. Your will is thus the driving force of your spirit, the engine of your soul that powers all that you do. It contains your dreams, your drive, your motivation, your intensity and your capacity to be an agent rather than an object - to change reality and be the force that energetically shifts your environment, rather than being directed by and dictated to by the energy of your environment. If you are a conqueror, you're an agent, if you're the conquered, you're an object. If you're the master, you're an agent, if you're a slave, you're an object. If you're the victor, you're the agent, if you're the victim, you're the object - there is a battle of energies, a winner and a loser - you get what you want, or you don't - which is why cooperation requires the alignment of incentives so both sides get what they want, but that is a separate topic altogether beyond the scope of this essay.
Applied will then is the idea that if you attack something for long enough by giving enough of your energy to it, whilst intelligently adapting your tactics as you learn it with full vigour and intensity, that it will eventually fall into your lap - or perhaps stated another way - God and the universe will grant you what you want because you have proven you are worthy of it through self-sacrifice and self-demonstration. Competence endows rewards, and rewards are the fulfilment of desires you have shown yourself deserving of. Ergo, you wanted it, you pursued the tools and understanding that would get you it, you developed the skills that allow you to employ those tools and execute that understanding - and the result is you end up precisely where you want to be.
Will in itself is not plagued by doubt or rational paralysis in probabilistic evaluation, because it is too obsessed with the desired end result to allow anything that obstructs it to dissuade it. To the will, logic is a tool that must serve it, not undermine it - so if logic can be used in the pursuit of will it is accepted, but if it undermines the will, it is discarded. To one with a strong will to power, unlike say, the prototypical atheist, logic is not God. Logic to the man animated by a strong intensity of will is simply a problem solving tool, or when used to obfuscate or deceive in pursuit of one's ends - a form of sophistry - but never the determinant of what is true and right and to be believed in, and what is wrong, false and to be rejected.
You could say in that sense the will to power is pathological - it's own of form of energy - an intentionality so strong it is its own form of primordial intelligence, directing you, living through you, spiritually augmenting you in the pursuit of your destiny - something those less energetically charged do not believe in, as they allow logic to constrain them within the reductive limitations of its systems thinking to evaluate the probability such a thing as destiny could even exist - which in its absence of falsifiability renders the tool effectively impotent, but in the absence of proof leads to the presumption of it not doing despite absence of evidence not being evidence of absence.
Will alone however, as important as it is in the way that I have defined it, is not competence. So whilst will is important (think of it as the impetus, the spark, the ignition, the flame, the animating force, the propellent, the driving force, the engine etc) it is a fundamentally necessary but not sufficient condition for paradise, if we define paradise as the idealised version of yourself doing the things that provide you with the most meaning and personal satisfaction in conjunction with the personal relationships (spouse, fraternity, children) that enable this idealised form.
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@FlurkFellows
