AMBITION OR OVER AMBITION?

Chess is such an addictive sport. Number of players playing the game has increased manifold in the last few years. Players who had quit chess due to various reasons decided to make a comeback to start playing again!
While some of them play for fun whilst the others play to achieve something or the other. In the last few years many of my friends/students have conveyed the same to me. To be honest, every now and then, even I think of reaching 2600+ [btw I am 2502 at the moment]
After a certain age, I think it’s important to be practical and brutally honest to ourselves! We have to assess our situation [Health,family,finance,time,profession/priorities etc] It is of course nothing wrong to be ambitious, but I believe it is also equally important to not be overambitious. Since this could lead to some sort of expectations which in turn might affect our game quality.
Let me share some of my experiences. In my early 20s I used to play in very strong events where I used to be seeded around 50 or so [my rating was roughly 2480-2550] Despite that I used to play the tournament to win it! Now it seems funny. But I wasn’t even aware what I was even thinking back then! Well, nothing wrong in thinking this way, but the main question is "did I practice enough to even dream such a thing"? Thinking of finishing top 30 would have been an ideal mindset since I had to overcome certain barriers.
These days I decided to not play much since I want to focus more on training. However I play every now and then since some of my students[ including IMs,GMs] jokingly sometimes say "It will be easier to teach rather than following them in a tournament game". I take this as a friendly challenge and I employ whatever we work on. When I played couple of events recently, my priority was to execute the ideas we learnt and not focus on winning the event[ ofcourse,it was not an easy thing to do, but somehow I tried my best to not focus on winning the event!]This way I could play the game more freely and did better to what I had expected!
To conclude the article, I think it’s better to understand more about ourselves, routine and commitments. Based on that we could set a realistic goal that could help us reach the next level and once we reach, then we can assign new goals. This way I believe our life can be a lot happier and peaceful!