Ambition in terms of risk/reward

When it comes to ambition, I tend to favor goals that are not so risky, but have high rewards. I've talked before about value-dense living. The basic premise is that my choices for activities, goals, and objectives should focus as much value as possible.  I want the greatest reward for the least amount of risk and effort.  With ambition, I strive for ever higher values, increasing rewards, and great achievements. The more ambitious I become, the more focused I must be on particular values and particular achievements.  The narrower the focus, the greater attention I can apply to one ambition.  People such as Thomas Edison had extremely narrow focus of goals, which allowed him to become perhaps the most prolific inventor in all history.  However, his focus on work made for an interesting relationship with his wife and kids (it doesn't sound like he had much of one).

In my previous post I noted that I don't wear myself thin much anymore.  I think this is in part because my ambitions have become almost a steady state of continuous improvement rather than a shot for the stars, mad-dash for extra-ordinary super duper large goals.  Now I try to balance my life to achieve value-dense living, pursuing values that add the most to my life and happiness.  This means cutting out many of the super large goals because they often don't bring any more satisfaction than the continuous improvement that I strive to obtain.  This doesn't mean that I won't find a place for big goals in the future, but they will have to offer extraordinary value above and beyond what I am currently achieving for me to adopt the goal and strive to complete it.