It's a funny thing... ambition. Too little of it and you end up on a couch in your mom's basement until she dies. Too much of it and you haven't got a friend in the world. The happy medium seems to be what someone should strive for. Finding that sweet spot somewhere between the destitute longing of poverty and the glassy-eyed empty shell of someone who can't enjoy the fruits of all their labor. You don't want to be Jane Fonda in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and you don't want to be Jane Fonda in her real-life, loveless marriage to Ted Turner, either.
I don't need a billion dollars to be happy. I think it's actually counter-productive to happiness to have that much money and success. There's a point when it's just gauche. I don't know about you, but I genuinely do not want to be Anna Wintour. She looks miserable.
Still, the urge to better yourself and rise above your station is not only admirable, it's completely natural. Who doesn't want to do more amazing things than your friends or your parents and be impressive?
Ambition is like a drug. A powerful delusion. The most ambitious people I know are just all go-go-go and it seems like they don't give failure a second thought. In their mind, they are rowing towards a destination with no room for their arms to get tired. Parish any thought of the boat springing a leak. They truly believe they will get there. Time is their only real enemy and their success is a reasonable eventuality.
Coco Chanel famously said, “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”
I think that pretty much sums up a winner's perspective. For myself, I know that typically the only thing that keeps me from accomplishing my goals is the fear of failure and I constantly turn those fears into self-fulfilling prophecies. I consider myself somewhat ambitious, but I know I haven't achieved everything I have hoped for. I'm not the kind of person to run a marathon, but I'm fascinated by someone who has the discipline to achieve greatness. Take, for instance, my new friend Karen.
Karen is a trainer at my club and she just trained for an Iron Man Marathon. I just asked her how she finds the motivation and discipline to train and work out, and she struggled for an answer. It was inexplicable to her where she gets it from. She said you have to set a goal and it is internal. I believe her. I think the same part of her brain that tells her to get up and run a marathon is the same part of my brain that is shriveled up and taken over by an overwhelming urge to sit down and watch television.
I think a lot about people's character traits and whether they are informed by nurture or nature. Is ambition a learned behavior or is failure genetic? Is there really a caste system in place in our DNA or do we just make the same mistakes we learn from our environment? I think a case could be made for both and I think my own family history is a prime example.
Like most Americans, my heritage is a melting pot of ethnicity, culture and socio-economic background. On the one side, half of me is made up of Russian Jews. They came from nothing. They struggled in the East Coast ghettos and, before that, they struggled in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the pogroms drove them to seek refuge in the Land of Opportunity. Before that, they were marginalized, enslaved and suffered the loss of a mass diaspora. That side of my family has a strong and rich history that I'm extremely proud of. On the one hand, it's their ambition as a people and as a family that brought me into the world and made me more fortunate in many ways than all those who came before me. On the other hand, although there have been success stories and impressive turnarounds of fortune here and there, they never seem to have completely risen above their station throughout history. My sister and I are the first generation to ever attain any secondary education. My grandmother was as smart as a whip, but she still never really achieved anything more than a marriage and children. Granted, it was a different time and all those before me faced great adversity and antisemitism. I just find it so fascinating that I come from such a liberal, fiercely intelligent stock and most of them could never rub two pennies together. Maybe their ambition was to live in a world where their children could be treated as equals in society, in which case, they were over-achievers and I couldn't be luckier to reap the benefits of all their sacrifice. Maybe they didn't care at all about their legacy and they didn't amount to anything significant. I'll never know.
On the other side of my family, it appears to be full of characters who achieved greatness in many fields. Great theologians, great legal minds, great world travelers and adventurers. Wealthy, smart, good-looking. Just a bunch of winners. And yet, that side of the family is so much more fragmented and disconnected. They don't really seem any happier than my blue-collar side... and I find it ironic that, while outwardly I certainly fit more with the shiny side of my family, I identify so much more with the scrappier side. I feel culturally Jewish. I love that aspect of my identity and it's what I relate to more. It's my long Hebrew name and my brown hair and brown eyes. It's my hairy chest and my taste for lox and gefilte fish. It just suits me better. It's comfortable and non-threatening... and yet, when I think of all the things I want in life and what I want to be more like, it's the other side of my family... the one I'm really not very attached to, that I feel the most akin to in regards to ambition. It's seductive... all the money and culture and gentile simplicity.
I have to wonder if my cousins are really very ambitious or if it's handed to them. Certainly, I grew up in the top 3% of the top 3% of social and financial circumstance and my relatives are in the 1%... In that 2% gap, I see a world of difference. They all seem much happier, but it also just seems like things just come to them. They went to the best schools and met all the best people and now they're budding moguls and artists and, yet, I feel much cooler than most of them. They all seem like little future executives and PTA moms and their life looks sort of empty and boring to me. There is no adversity. There is no color. I can't use a blanket statement, because certainly some of them are completely wonderful and I'm lucky to be related to them, but some of them remind me of a Presbyterian congregation on Easter Sunday in a wealthy area. That's what I think of when I think of them and, basically, no thanks.
So, maybe I fail at being that cookie cutter brand of happy, but I succeed at having more layers and complexity. Maybe ambition is a farce, because no two people have the same goal. If one person's goal is to have perfect hair and a perfect life, another person's goal is to have crazy hair and a messy life. Messy, but much more interesting than perfect. I've felt like I've been in competition with so many different people for so many different reasons my whole life... it's only now, in my 30th year, that I really am starting to understand that it's all in my head. I'm only in competition with myself. Something is only really a failure if I didn't truly go for it, or didn't learn from it, or couldn't accept that it was part of my own process. It's funny how hard that's been to understand. True ambition, for me, in my life... it's working towards something that will make me better. Something that will make my life better or the world better. The rest... the money or the car or the house or the stuff... it's nice. It's nice, but it's not real. It all rots away. You were born naked and will die with nothing. You can't take it with you... so instead of working hard towards some skewed perception of ambition... I need to remind myself:
This is all a game. This social construct that we call a society is just a big illusion. We are in the long con and we can either be the victim of the lie, play along or change the rules. I'm not going to act like I'm not above money or appreciating life experience... but I think I need to take a step back and ask what I'm working towards, what void it's supposed to be filling and if it's working.
The happiest I ever am is sitting alone on a beach on a sunny day... and that's free. It doesn't cost a thing and I don't have to be somebody important to be there. It's just me and my toes in the sand with orange light seeping through my eyelids and ions bouncing off the water penetrating all my cells... It's simple and clean and pure and just about the best thing I can experience in life. There's no item or diploma or status I would trade that for.
So, when I think of that, I can't help but wonder if maybe my greatest failure in life has thus far been, in fact, my ambition.
I don't need a billion dollars to be happy. I think it's actually counter-productive to happiness to have that much money and success. There's a point when it's just gauche. I don't know about you, but I genuinely do not want to be Anna Wintour. She looks miserable.
Still, the urge to better yourself and rise above your station is not only admirable, it's completely natural. Who doesn't want to do more amazing things than your friends or your parents and be impressive?
Ambition is like a drug. A powerful delusion. The most ambitious people I know are just all go-go-go and it seems like they don't give failure a second thought. In their mind, they are rowing towards a destination with no room for their arms to get tired. Parish any thought of the boat springing a leak. They truly believe they will get there. Time is their only real enemy and their success is a reasonable eventuality.
Coco Chanel famously said, “Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.”
I think that pretty much sums up a winner's perspective. For myself, I know that typically the only thing that keeps me from accomplishing my goals is the fear of failure and I constantly turn those fears into self-fulfilling prophecies. I consider myself somewhat ambitious, but I know I haven't achieved everything I have hoped for. I'm not the kind of person to run a marathon, but I'm fascinated by someone who has the discipline to achieve greatness. Take, for instance, my new friend Karen.
Karen is a trainer at my club and she just trained for an Iron Man Marathon. I just asked her how she finds the motivation and discipline to train and work out, and she struggled for an answer. It was inexplicable to her where she gets it from. She said you have to set a goal and it is internal. I believe her. I think the same part of her brain that tells her to get up and run a marathon is the same part of my brain that is shriveled up and taken over by an overwhelming urge to sit down and watch television.
I think a lot about people's character traits and whether they are informed by nurture or nature. Is ambition a learned behavior or is failure genetic? Is there really a caste system in place in our DNA or do we just make the same mistakes we learn from our environment? I think a case could be made for both and I think my own family history is a prime example.
Like most Americans, my heritage is a melting pot of ethnicity, culture and socio-economic background. On the one side, half of me is made up of Russian Jews. They came from nothing. They struggled in the East Coast ghettos and, before that, they struggled in the shtetls of Eastern Europe before the pogroms drove them to seek refuge in the Land of Opportunity. Before that, they were marginalized, enslaved and suffered the loss of a mass diaspora. That side of my family has a strong and rich history that I'm extremely proud of. On the one hand, it's their ambition as a people and as a family that brought me into the world and made me more fortunate in many ways than all those who came before me. On the other hand, although there have been success stories and impressive turnarounds of fortune here and there, they never seem to have completely risen above their station throughout history. My sister and I are the first generation to ever attain any secondary education. My grandmother was as smart as a whip, but she still never really achieved anything more than a marriage and children. Granted, it was a different time and all those before me faced great adversity and antisemitism. I just find it so fascinating that I come from such a liberal, fiercely intelligent stock and most of them could never rub two pennies together. Maybe their ambition was to live in a world where their children could be treated as equals in society, in which case, they were over-achievers and I couldn't be luckier to reap the benefits of all their sacrifice. Maybe they didn't care at all about their legacy and they didn't amount to anything significant. I'll never know.
On the other side of my family, it appears to be full of characters who achieved greatness in many fields. Great theologians, great legal minds, great world travelers and adventurers. Wealthy, smart, good-looking. Just a bunch of winners. And yet, that side of the family is so much more fragmented and disconnected. They don't really seem any happier than my blue-collar side... and I find it ironic that, while outwardly I certainly fit more with the shiny side of my family, I identify so much more with the scrappier side. I feel culturally Jewish. I love that aspect of my identity and it's what I relate to more. It's my long Hebrew name and my brown hair and brown eyes. It's my hairy chest and my taste for lox and gefilte fish. It just suits me better. It's comfortable and non-threatening... and yet, when I think of all the things I want in life and what I want to be more like, it's the other side of my family... the one I'm really not very attached to, that I feel the most akin to in regards to ambition. It's seductive... all the money and culture and gentile simplicity.
I have to wonder if my cousins are really very ambitious or if it's handed to them. Certainly, I grew up in the top 3% of the top 3% of social and financial circumstance and my relatives are in the 1%... In that 2% gap, I see a world of difference. They all seem much happier, but it also just seems like things just come to them. They went to the best schools and met all the best people and now they're budding moguls and artists and, yet, I feel much cooler than most of them. They all seem like little future executives and PTA moms and their life looks sort of empty and boring to me. There is no adversity. There is no color. I can't use a blanket statement, because certainly some of them are completely wonderful and I'm lucky to be related to them, but some of them remind me of a Presbyterian congregation on Easter Sunday in a wealthy area. That's what I think of when I think of them and, basically, no thanks.
So, maybe I fail at being that cookie cutter brand of happy, but I succeed at having more layers and complexity. Maybe ambition is a farce, because no two people have the same goal. If one person's goal is to have perfect hair and a perfect life, another person's goal is to have crazy hair and a messy life. Messy, but much more interesting than perfect. I've felt like I've been in competition with so many different people for so many different reasons my whole life... it's only now, in my 30th year, that I really am starting to understand that it's all in my head. I'm only in competition with myself. Something is only really a failure if I didn't truly go for it, or didn't learn from it, or couldn't accept that it was part of my own process. It's funny how hard that's been to understand. True ambition, for me, in my life... it's working towards something that will make me better. Something that will make my life better or the world better. The rest... the money or the car or the house or the stuff... it's nice. It's nice, but it's not real. It all rots away. You were born naked and will die with nothing. You can't take it with you... so instead of working hard towards some skewed perception of ambition... I need to remind myself:
This is all a game. This social construct that we call a society is just a big illusion. We are in the long con and we can either be the victim of the lie, play along or change the rules. I'm not going to act like I'm not above money or appreciating life experience... but I think I need to take a step back and ask what I'm working towards, what void it's supposed to be filling and if it's working.
The happiest I ever am is sitting alone on a beach on a sunny day... and that's free. It doesn't cost a thing and I don't have to be somebody important to be there. It's just me and my toes in the sand with orange light seeping through my eyelids and ions bouncing off the water penetrating all my cells... It's simple and clean and pure and just about the best thing I can experience in life. There's no item or diploma or status I would trade that for.
So, when I think of that, I can't help but wonder if maybe my greatest failure in life has thus far been, in fact, my ambition.
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