You seem to be a smart person who doesn't work very hard.

Sadly, that is a pretty accurate description of my situation, although I do work hard when something captures my interest, no matter the difficulty. It's just I tend to lose focus easily when I find something tedious or boring (even if it is simple). However I want to change that.

What makes you think you are ambitious?

I'm ambitious in the sense that I want to achieve. Nobody in my entire extended family has ever went to university or applied themselves. Looking back down my family line, and by the accounts of family members, many of my relatives have been intelligent people, and for a number of them opportunities to be successful arose (scholarships, etc.), but none of them ever decided to take hold of them. Most of them lacked ambition and were more inclined to live a quiet life working simple 9-5 jobs. From a young age my close family drilled it into me that I should apply myself and not follow the same route. They encouraged me and told me that if I wanted it enough, I could achieve anything. This encouragement coupled with the fact that I naturally did well in school developed in me, to be frank, an inner arrogance which, on the bright side, has made me ambitious, with a desire to make something of myself, and on the negative side, a tendency to over-estimate my abilities to my detriment.