"consuming ambition" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to an intense and powerful drive to pursue a particular goal or achieve some kind of success. For example, "Her consuming ambition to become an Olympic athlete drove her to push her body and mind to their limits."
The irony is that Jordan is not the best basketball player ever, which is the working definition and consuming ambition of those who would be great.
Like the spelling bee, Buddiga saw poker on TV and his dabbling quickly turned into a consuming ambition.
Hargrove made it clear his disposition would change by game time, when getting to Colts quarterback Peyton Manning will be his consuming ambition.
Manns Hepburn sustains her nearly 70-year career from a consuming ambition to become and stay famous, what she herself called a wild desire to be absolutely fascinating.
It begins in 1980, with a parking lot encounter between Mr. Harris and Larry Huff, a voluble young man whose consuming ambition is to be "on the tube, the set, television".
Every story says, "This guy with his consuming ambition, he just couldn't wait; just everything he did, he was just obsessed with the prospect of being chairman of the Fed". So, baloney.
Nobody accomplishes much in politics without consuming ambitions, but sometimes they are changed along the way.
It may take as many years again to do so: to review the climax of her career in more positive terms than release, relief, reprieve; or to master, conceivably, that dreadful human instinct for discovering a questioning vacuum even in satisfying so consuming an ambition.
So if I were Donnie Walsh, clearing Knicks salary-cap space by 2010 would be my all-consuming ambition.
But the show's book writers (Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert) failed to give Ponty any defining traits beyond all-consuming ambition.
There is, as there was in "Snakebit," an attractive, quirky woman of eroding confidence sliding moorlessly into middle age; a slick charmer of all-consuming ambition and slippery ethics; and between them, an unhappy, morally probing gay male in a general state of confusion.
