--- title: The Ambition Project | daily.dev description: Jason Brennan's 'Ambition' first-year seminar at Georgetown assigns students experiential challenges designed to build resilience, self-awareness, and social... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-ambition-project-rrh5cp9ko twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The Ambition Project | daily.dev og:description: Jason Brennan's 'Ambition' first-year seminar at Georgetown assigns students experiential challenges designed to build resilience, self-awareness, and social... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-ambition-project-rrh5cp9ko og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/RRh5cP9ko.png og:image:alt: The Ambition Project og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The Ambition Project **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Jason Brennan's 'Ambition' first-year seminar at Georgetown assigns students experiential challenges designed to build resilience, self-awareness, and social skills. Students must complete four of eight projects, including at least one starred assignment. The projects include deliberately failing at something in public, helping five people in a single day, seeking rejection, expressing gratitude in person, saying no for an entire day, counting grass blades for 90 minutes, auditing one's own reputation, and trading a $1 item up to the highest possible value (current record: $360). ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What is the current record for the trading project assignment where you start with a $1 item? The current record for the trading project — starting with a $1 item and trading up through a series of exchanges — is $360. Students are prohibited from adding value through services, charity appeals, or threats, and the final value must be verifiable via retail websites. _Developers building side projects or negotiating career moves track unconventional growth strategies on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 2 discussions and 16 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-10). **TL;DR:** Commenters find the Ambition Project's exercises broadly interesting and relatable, though some raise ethical concerns about assignments that involve other people without their knowledge or consent. **Sentiment:** 45% positive · 35% mixed · 20% skeptical **The case for** - The exercises seem genuinely useful for building self-awareness and resilience, with some commenters expressing personal interest in trying them. - Karaoke-style public failure exercises are seen by some as low-stakes and fun rather than traumatic, even sober. **The pushback** - The 'Impossible Day Project' (asking people for help and then rejecting them) is seen as potentially manipulative and unfair to unsuspecting participants. - Anxiety around public failure exercises may be more significant for some people than the curriculum acknowledges. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are intrigued by the concept but debate whether certain exercises cross ethical lines by involving unwitting third parties. **Hottest debate:** Whether the 'Impossible Day Project' is a legitimate resilience exercise or an unfair imposition on people who don't know they're part of an experiment. **Open questions** - How does the course handle participants who have genuine anxiety disorders or trauma related to public failure? - Are third parties who are unknowingly involved in student exercises given any recourse or explanation afterward? **Highlights** > I think it's one thing to do this for yourself or subject others to it in a somewhat mild form (e.g. have them listen to bad karaoke) but "2. The Impossible Day Project" goes too far for me. If I was one of those people who are asked, thought about what we could do together, and then get rejected as part of some game or experiment, I'd be upset. > — [larelli on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49241650) > That was not my experience with karaoke. I suck at singing. I don't like karaoke much. I still go there sober and have a blast. This is not a place where you take yourself seriously. Nobody expects Whitney Houston, just a random guy with good vibes. > — [nicbou on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242646) > As someone would have graduated from college for 10 years, I found the ambition project fascinating. As I grow old, I understand myself much more about my own weakness and strength. I would like to take the project as a catalog to train some part of myself out of it. > — [yuanBuilds on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49238798) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49200777) · 1 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49237407) · 51 points · 16 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Behind every long-term vision is a kid who simply refused to quit.](https://daily.dev/posts/behind-every-long-term-vision-is-a-kid-who-simply-refused-to-quit--lev2q7kcu) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Nabeel S. 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