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How would you define "ambition?"

I don`t think lack of ambition is necessarily a bad thing. If your kids are happy to go with the flow, even if that flow is painfully average, then they have a lifetime of peaceful contentedness to look forward to. There are whole religions dedicated to ambitiously pursuing lack of ambition for that exact reason.

I think raising 4 kids (with 2 teenagers and a toddler at the same time no less) seems pretty ambitious to me, but if you really feel the need to model something in addition to that, you could start a little part time business. I know a number of moms who`ve organized local food buying clubs, it doesn`t seem to take a lot of time and it covers their expensive organic food habits. Just a thought, for what it`s worth.

—paula

Hi there, Yvette :-)
Suppose we go with ambition being the process of setting and reaching goals. We`ve all heard stories of the person who wants to be a partner in a law firm, and works steadily. Then there`s the guy who kisses ass, constantly is sycophantic, and overly eager, and we say he`s "ambitious."

Coming from another direction, I have a goal of going fishing and so I do it on Saturday. Does that mean I`m ambitious? I set a goal, proceeded to act on it, and successfully went fishing. Is that ambition? Not really, I think.

We all seem to know what we mean when we call someone ambitious, or when we say we have "an ambition," and yet, like so many conceptual words, we don`t seem to have a definition that really applies. An ambition does seem to connect with dreams and aspiration, which are a bit more or are different from basic goals.

Ambition is a measure, not a thing and not an innate attribute of human being. It measures a ratio---a connected relationship of measurements. The two parts of the ratio are desire (wanting) and longevity (priority).

Someone is ambitious, having an ambition, when they make a long-term goal one of their highest priorities. It isn`t a feeling---those last only a few days. Instead, it`s a value---an emotional or thoughtful goal.

You say your parents had no ambition? What about their desire to have a comfortable, simple, affordable life, where they could raise a family and spend time with that family? They seem to have accomplished it, but on the surface, they didn`t have "large" ambitions. We could, though, say that in today`s world of splintered nuclear families, having a stable family life might be pretty large.

To be content isn`t at all the same as being happy, and that isn`t the same as being joyful. However, being ambitious doesn`t necessarily lead to happiness. If you want to train someone to be ambitious, they first must have the discipline to form a functional value, understand that value, translate it into real-world events, then stay the course toward their goal.

In other words, the movement toward the long-term goal is no longer a "desire," or a feeling; it`s part of their core value system---their morality.

Craig -- so if ambition is a matter of morality, does that make it right? or wrong? Or does it function as a framework within which to measure the moral value of specific actions? Is ambition a measure of morality for just one person`s individual value system, or does it scale to whole societies?

I`m curious because I vaguely know this is part of the morality system Ayn Rand devised, but I don`t know anything more about it beyond that. My little brother is also a fan of Ayn Rand and he finds it hilarious when villains in popular entertainment are villainous because of their ambition. I never got the joke.

Craig you seriously need a blog.

—p

Yes, ambition is an issue of morality. The problem is that most people these days hear the word "morality" and think it means a universal morality. It`s not. We each of us develop a morality, through education and child-rearing, and we "hope" that everyone in a society has the same or very similar morality---value system. That`s, of course, not the case in today`s world.

The most tragic aspect of today`s collapse is that there`s a grain of truth in the statement that there`s a right and wrong for "each of us." The missing premise is that *in theory* each of us is acting in concert to build a common society. Ergo, what`s "right and wrong" should align between our personal morality, and the law of the society.

The reason a person feels guilty or ashamed if they`re not working on an ambition is because it`s a moral situation. That morality sets the rules we each follow in handling life. There`s no such thing as a totally amoral person---someone with no values. Everyone has values, it`s only that theirs may not at all coincide with the society`s overall values.

People with an ambition are internally driven, and if they slack off from that ambition, they really do feel guilty or ashamed. The most powerful drivers in life are those with physical feelings connected to them. And so they have a conscience (moral system) that disallows lack of ambition.

Ayn Rand didn`t come up with this, I did. I consider Rand to be the pre-eminent philosopher of the 20th century, but she only laid the groundwork. She didn`t carry the logic forward in many areas, particularly in the semantics of modern life.

Political correctness is a form of language destruction, as is so-called reality therapy and other modern terms. Words create nothing: They reflect our observations of reality, both abstract and concrete. What we see as there or not in ambition is this moral value that having a long-term goal is "good."

Of course a moral system is taught. Children prior to puberty are more animal than human, and have no moral structure yet. They`re developing it, and some parts of it become set along the way. Some toddlers feel terribly when they lie, IF they know what it means to lie. But they`ve learned that.

By the time a child reaches around 12 or so, they`ve received the moral values but haven`t yet integrated them with their emotions. We develop emotions right around that puberty age. Depending on each person`s circumstances, they`ll include a value for ambition or not.

That being said, most people can add or subtract values throughout their lives. As such, anyone can learn to be ambitious, if they`re taught to value ambition---goals, discipline, stick-to-it-edness, and so forth.

But again, what may appear to others as lack of ambition could easily be those others not seeing what the actual value is that someone`s going after. Lots of young people see saving money as a waste of time, and someone whose ambition is to have $50,000 in some sort of savings as being pointless. Does that mean the person doing the saving has no ambition?