Are ambition and achievement at odds with Spiritual Wisdom?
Absolutely Not!
Those of a moral persuasion can feel uncomfortable with the ideas of ambition and achievement, but there is no need for this - to be ambitious and seeking to achieve are ideal aspirations, as they foster focus, discipline, hard work, and excellence.
There is no reason why ambition and achievement cannot take a central role in the evolution of the self, and, in fact, they are highly desirable qualities. The seeker of self-empowerment will achieve far better results when aspiring to advance on all levels, and the presence of ambition and desire for achievement gives an excellent practical focus for individual spiritual concepts; as the other-worldly forces at play in one's life are revealed, pursuing ambition and actually achieving become much more of a logical process than simply charging blind-fold against a wall of intangible opposition. If you know the rules of the game, you can plan how to advance.
There is a Japanese concept known as "gambari" (pronounced gam-ba-rih), which is widely associated with many forms of persistence, including hard work, devotion to a cause, loyalty to a community, and the ambition to succeed, to win; among the famously hard-working Japanese, "gambare" is a concept by which they live every day. Needless to say, Kendo encourages adherence to this concept, and its extension to all levels of the self - ambition is practically a pre-requisite for studying Kendo's Spiritual Wisdom, and a corner-stone of Pathways to Power; ambition feeds into self-empowerment, which feeds into the achievement of one's ambitions.
In capitalist countries, much concerning ambition and achievement relates to acquisition, and Kendo's pages on Lifestyle counsel on an enlightened approach to this, but there are other forms of ambition, such as the desire to gain respect, admiration, and even sexual satisfaction. At this point it is worth noting that the last pursuit is less of an actual ambition, and more of a biological drive; the pursuit of sex can become akin to an ambition, but it is more the expression of self-gratification - true ambitions are higher up the scale of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, and it is important to recognise the difference. A solely self-serving self-indulgence will blinker you to the areas where you can genuinely achieve, and implement genuine soul-growth.
The foregoing notwithstanding, being ambitious and seeking to achieve are positive qualities, as they fuel progress in human evolution. As is rightly said on Kendo's page about Lifestyle, seeking to surround oneself with the best things in life is also an ambition for the more refined, more aesthetic things, being surrounded by which can in themselves continue to raise the quality of one's own vibration. In contrast to the saying from the movie, greed is not good, but ambition most certainly is!