My interpretation wouldn't be that ambitions are expensive monetarily, but rather in terms of time. I've got various hobbies where spending more money doesn't r

My interpretation wouldn't be that ambitions are expensive monetarily, but rather in terms of time. I've got various hobbies where spending more money doesn't really get me anywhere - if I was more ambitious, I'd need to scale down my work to somewhere between 0-50% FTE to devote more time to a particular hobby.