All the Gold Stars

Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive

By: Rainesford Stauffer

Narrated by: Jess Nahikian

From journalist and author of An Ordinary Age, an examination, dismantling, and reconstruction of ambition, where burnout is the symptom of our holiest sin: the lonely way we strive.

Ambition—the want, the hunger, the need to achieve—is woven into America’s fabric from the first colonization to capitalism. From our first gold star assignment to acceptance at the “right” college to hustle and grinding our lives, we celebrate our drive, even as we gatekeep who is permitted to strive--and how visibly. Even as we burn out. When we can’t even. When we know: work won’t love us back.

All the Gold Stars looks at how the cultural, personal, and societal expectations around ambition are driving the burnout epidemic by funneling our worth into productivity, limiting our imaginations, and pushing us further apart. Through the devastating personal narrative of her own ambition crisis, Stauffer discovers the common factors driving us all, peeling back layers of family expectations, capitalism, and self-esteem that dangerously tie up our worth in our output. Interviews with students, parents, workers, psychologists, labor organizers, and more offer a new definition of ambition and the tools to reframe our lives around true success.

All the Gold Stars provides ways for us to reject our current reality and reconceive ambition as more collective, imaginative, and rooted in caring for ourselves and each other.

©2023 Rainesford Stauffer (P)2023 Hachette Go

Critic reviews

“If you've been doing ‘everything right’ for as long as you can remember, and can't quite figure out why you're so exhausted, or bored, or unmotivated, or just over it—this book will change your life. Rainesford Stauffer gives us permission—and the language!—to imagine a different way forward.”
—Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation

"In All the Gold Stars, Rainesford Stauffer looks at our societal conversations around ambition and success for young people, and deftly unravels the myriad of ways those conversations preach a cruel and unyielding message to the inheritors of this society: deny the limits of your humanity to get ahead. Stauffer speaks with those deeply affected by this warped messaging, and writes a new narrative for us. One that includes an acknowledgement of our humanness, our need for play, and a more compassionate path to a better future. Read this book, and expand your imagination beyond what is, and toward what could be."

—Ashley C. Ford, Writer and Host

"All the Gold Stars is a probing, challenging, and deeply thoughtful exploration of what it means to find compassion for ourselves and pursue the lives we want without self-punishment. Drawing on her own experiences as well as dozens of interviews, Rainesford Stauffer writes with both clarity and care, considering the function and purpose of ambition from multiple angles while inviting readers to imagine how it may be redirected to aid and nourish us and our communities. If you, like so many born or made strivers, are engaged in the work of reevaluating your relationship to ambition and achievement, this is a wonderful book to keep you company as you do so."—Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy

Five ironic stars for this book

It’s a bit wild to tap stats for this hood because it’s about free yourself from meritocracy.

Go read it. Challenge your ambition.

Another ironic 5 stars

5 stars but not because that’s what we should all be aiming for but because of the honesty and reflection present in this book. As someone who is a planner, a list maker, a check box checker, I too have found my love for ambition, not exactly waining, but molting. Changing into something new and it’s exciting to hear I am not alone in such an endeavor. Whether it’s hustle culture or woman who does it all vibes that have you questioning your own level of ambition, this book suggests we back up and rethink that judgement.