Teaching Ambition

It’s invisible, elastic, demanding, and can play head games with your brain. It’s the power to do good and evil, to create and destroy. It’s an elixir, a real high and can be a pain in the ass. Ambition is all of those things and more. It comes in all sizes and shapes. Iteration be damned, it can be all around us and we don’t even know it.

So, who is that fat old man slogging along the blacktop pathway at 6:00 in the morning? He’s over-weight, in poor form, carrying his head down and is probably in a world of hurt. He’s so slow that turtles are passing him on their way to breakfast. Why isn’t he at the coffee shop with the other retirees; those oldsters who spend a good part of their days bitching about the government and life in general?

Who is that lithe young girl running like a gazelle so easily and eloquently in the morning dew? She passes the old man and they smile at one another, if only for one brief moment, then they’re back to their own space; encapsulated in their own thoughts and reflections.

Who is the middle-aged woman at a Community Ed painting class sitting beside that macho guy, both focused on their hard scribbles few other people would call a painting? Yet they don’t seem to care or even notice. They keep dabbling, experimenting, making smears across the canvas that only they can understand and appreciate.

Most of us are familiar with the successes of Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon). What were these folks trying to prove? Why engage in these mundane endeavors? Obviously, it wasn’t for anyone else because nobody else gave a hoot what they’re up to.

I would suggest they’re following their passion, their ambition. That internal engine that drives them to push their bodies, push their desire, push their need to do… I tried to explore that concept in one of my first novels. The best way I found to describe my protagonist was to say that he was ‘hungry.’

But what is ambition? What drives ambition? And more to my point of interest, how do you instill ambition in your kids or grandkids? I have no pat answers. It’s always easier to ask questions than to pull answers out of that cauldron called life.

For example, what happens when you’ve worked hard all your life for those things you feel you deserve and you want your kids to have? There’s nothing wrong with that but how do you keep your kids hungry when you’ve fed them so well?

How do you balance giving your kids material things and still hope they have a desire to go beyond those sundry distractions for more real substance in their lives? How do you feed ambition in your kids when they’re living a privileged life (relatively speaking)? Privileged because you wanted it that way.

How do you help them understand the power of money and the responsibility that goes with it? Yet you don’t want to deprive them of any of the experiences you had or didn’t have growing up yourself.

I don’t think there’s a set answer out there or a guidebook that details how to build desire and want in a young person’s mind. Some have it and others don’t. I was lucky. I was born poor and didn’t have far to go to move in another direction. Absence does fuel a strong desire in some people to…

With our own kids, we simply had expectations. Most were unspoken, unwritten, seldom talked about but always understood. And we gave them opportunities. Lots and lots of opportunities. That seemed to work for us.

Now with the grandchildren, we’ve taken on a supporting role in raising and educating them; always in deference to our own kids and their spouses. Their parenting decisions always pull the most weight. But that doesn’t mean we can’t suggest, offer, volunteer, or otherwise support ideas of our own. Seems to be working for us.

My theory is to let kids explore whatever they want to. And encourage them to do so.

Sharon and I tend to give our grandkids lots and lots of experiences and opportunities. And have plenty of expectations for all of them at the same time. I want them to be like that old man and young girl jogging in the morning. And the middle-aged woman and guy exploring their respective talents for painting. I want my grandkids to do, to try, to experiment, to fail more than once and to try again. And again. And again.

And that old man who is out jogging each morning. He’ll probably never run a real race, even a 5k. But he keeps chugging along. Day after day. And yet when he’s done and he’s hurting and rank and exhausted, he is still in his own world of Valhalla. Because he’s done what so many of us only wish we could do. The irony, of course, is that we all could too.

If only…

If only…

If only…