How to Teach Ambition

Mom and I

You can’t!

At least I don’t think you can teach driving ambition and learned hunger from a book or video or TED presentation. I believe it’s something that is inherently part of a person’s psychic or personality. A trait intrinsically linked to or inherited at conception and like the gift that it can or can’t be, it is released when outside forces force that desire to the surface.

Two children are born of the same parents and raised in the same household. Yet surprisingly both individuals can be radically different in their demeanor, tastes, interests and ambitions. Neither is right. Neither is wrong. It is the hand they were dealt. Go figure!

One of the great illusions of life is that we must all be blindly ambitious because we’ve told (falsely) that all the greats of stage and screen and sports and business have somehow corralled that magic formula for success and therefore are infinitely happy with the results. That fable is no more relevant than the bulletin board in our daily lives that keeps hinting that the status-quo is never quite good enough.

I think there should be a balance between ‘who is hungry’ and ‘who cares.’ If a person’s existence is satisfying and fulfilling to them, it hardly matters what the pundits say about the need for more of anything in their lives. Ambition is neither a gift nor a curse; it simply is what it is. Properly harnessed it can do great good. Unbridled, it can cause great harm.

My mother on the farm

My Mother had a sixth-grade education because her parents insisted she stay on the farm to feed the chickens (true story). She eventually left St. Martin, Minnesota to become a maid on Summit Avenue then a short order cook in downtown Saint Paul. By most standards of the day, she and her husband were a very ambitious couple married during the war years. Housing was scarce and jobs hard to find. They started a restaurant but when it failed he turned to drink and she turned to prayers.

My mother with two kids

After my father disappeared my mother was left with two small children, no visible means of support, no formal education, and few marketable job skills. Yet she somehow managed not only to survive but also thrive. She built her own home and sent her kids to Catholic grade school. Unlike her married sisters, she wanted more out of life and got it by hard work, enormous sacrifice and praying a lot. There were seven siblings in her farm family and she was, by far, the most ambitious one of the lot.

Mom and I

A good friend of mine has suggested that most of us learn by example. He believes that many people have a built-in hunger threshold that can trigger a desire for more even if it can’t be defined or explained. Perhaps that’s how you can explain a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Both men were born into comfortable, loving middle class families and yet at an early age both had a desire for more than just the status quo. The Beatles and Bob Dylan knew at an early age that they were not going to simply follow the accepted pathway to success as all their classmates were doing.

For the clear majority of retirees, the next stage after full time work is one of relaxation, reflection, and satisfaction with a life well-lived. There is nothing wrong with that. Most folks embrace the opportunity to do those little things they’ve never had time for or to keep dipping into their proverbial bucket list to keep checking off experiences that have eluded them in the past. It would hardly seem to be the time to push forward with new ventures and challenges and needless worries.

For some this desire for more is a curse, robbing an individual of a good night’s sleep, quiet days reading on the porch, social banter at the coffee shop and several rounds of golf. But this curse has a good side to it. Doing what one must do.

For those folks, it is a hunger born of a thousand ‘what if’s’ and nebulous goals yet unfulfilled. For them, it is the answer as to why they’re here on the planet and for those lucky individuals, all the other questions matter not. They’re doing what they want to do, have to do and couldn’t do anything else. It’s why they get up each morning and have trouble sleeping at night. With the time remaining, it is what keeps them alive and moving and seeking their very own vision quest.

And each hopes in their own very distinct way that when the final curtain is drawn, they’ll still be hard at it (whatever it is) and it was still satisfying even up until the end.

Driven from Within

Where does motivation come from?

I have my own theories. In fact, they’re pretty deeply entrenched ideas of how and why some folks become motivated and others spend most of their lives just floating along.

It’s a bit of an obsession with me. I wasn’t cognizant of that fact until I got into writing on a full time basis. That theme of ‘being hungry’ has permeated a lot of my writing. The desire for more, for something else, something better has crept into two of my books “Love in the A Shau” and “Debris.” Both novels feature hungry young men determined to make a success of themselves. It’s a theme I can relate to and a vision quest I don’t ever see ending.

Let’s face it. We’re only here on earth for a brief period of time. Why wouldn’t we want to make the very most out of every minute of our existence? Why wouldn’t we want to do something with our lives that was worthwhile, satisfying and hopefully of benefit to others? And more importantly, why wouldn’t we want the same for our own children and grandchildren?

But anything worth doing is going to require some kind of sacrifice. Nothing comes easy…at least for most of us. When you’re born at the bottom then anything above that looks pretty good. When you have nothing growing up then you don’t long for those vapid pleasures that don’t amount to a hill of beans in the overall scheme of living. Growing up with the basics gives one a real appreciation for the simpler things of life.

That doesn’t mean you don’t want more. It simply means you appreciate the basic values of your own existence and can realistically grasp the intrinsic appeal of other things beyond your reach. There is value in being raised with a focus on the fundamentals of living and a scarcity of those extraneous distractions of wealth.

It’s not always easy being born rich. The three generation theory has been around for a long time. Among other monikers, it’s been called shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.

Based on fact and some fiction, the theory simply asserts that most businesses don’t survive beyond the third generation of owners. Grandpa starts the business. His son takes over and continues for a time. But by the time a third generation is ready to step up to the plate, the discipline and hunger for success has been muted and gutted for all intents and purposes.

And it’s hardly unique to this country. In China, it’s called rice paddy to rice paddy. In Italy, it’s called cobbler to cobbler. In Ireland, it’s called clogs to clogs.

Being born poor and hungry can be a strong motivator for the taste of success. But what if your kids aren’t growing up poor like you were? What if they’ve had a lot of advantages simply because that’s what their parents (your own kids) want them to have? Do we deny them opportunities to travel, read a lot, go to a good school or have other life experiences we could never dream of when we were growing up? I think not.

Inherent in my personality is a deep-seated prejudice about giving kids ‘everything’ simply because their parents can afford it. I think there are distinct disadvantages of being raised a rich environment. And we all know who ‘they’ are. Back in high school, they were all gathered around the ‘most popular’ table in the cafeteria. Their descendants are still there today.

So where’s the balance between giving your kids or grandkids every opportunity you can to enrich their lives and still raise them as responsible, respectable and appreciative citizens of the world?

I certainly don’t have all the answers as to how to motivate young people nowadays especially my own grandchildren. The best advice I could probably give my own kids is to lead by example. To reward their own children’s efforts and not necessarily their success. And to remind their kids that practice makes for opportunities.

I didn’t become a writer in my advanced age because I wanted to.  I’m not writing because I have nothing else to do. I’m not writing because it makes me feel important. What I try to explain to these well-meaning folks who ask why I do it…is that I have no choice. This isn’t something that I can play with occasionally when the mood strikes. This is something that I have to do.

The writer in me has to get involved in my character’s lives. I have to travel back out west occasionally and I have to muddle around the under-belly of Palm Springs when the time comes. I have to do what I do because I was born hungry and still am today. I hope to stay hungry for the rest of my life.

In past blogs, I’ve commented that I want my grandchildren to ‘be hungry.’ Thus far, I think they’re developing a pretty healthy appetite for more. Hopefully at some point in their young lives, they’ll come to understand that old adage as I did a long time ago.

That the harder they work, the luckier they might become.