You didn't pick your first ambition.
Adults who confused prestige with wisdom handed it to you.
You learned to want their approval. Eventually you mistook that for wanting the goal.
I wrote about how to notice, and how to build something that's actually yours.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-tell-if-youre-living-someone
@Daojoan Not just first. Most people spend their entire lifetime chasing goals prescribed by others – peers, culture, society. The insidious part is that it's subconscious; we don't realize we're conditioned. We don't learn to separate our own desires from others' (precisely because of the need to be pleasing, as you aptly mentioned) until, maybe, late in life. That humans are social animals who marginalize difference makes it profoundly difficult to break free.