The Goddess Ambition Loses Her Head but Keeps Her Laurel CrownChristine Elder, a Bellarmine University freshman asks: How did you get motivated to do so many things in your life? How do you handle all of the stress of your ambitions?
Ambition and Motivation
Christine: your question(s) is astute, perceptive and insightful.
1) Ambition: for as long as my activities were driven by ambition, life was filled with stress. And when my activities were drive by vaulting ambition, which they were, my life was filled with even more stress, for which I paid dearly.
Read what my Renaissance priest, Montaigne, said:
Ambition sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping themselves always in show, like the statue of a public place.
Can you imagine anything more stressful than always being on public display? Oscar Wilde is more acerbic:
Ambition is the last refuge of failure.
So, the cure for the stress created by ambition, dear Christine, is to abandon ambition and substitute enterprise. While enterprise appears to be ambition’s fellow-traveler, it comes from a different place and leads to a different place even though the two share a common road from time to time.
2) Motivation: Where did my motivation come from? Motivation is the father and mother of ambition and enterprise. Motives can be good, bad, neutral, high-minded or pedestrian. My motivation came from all those places. As I’ve matured, and abandoned ambition for enterprise, I have tried to center my motivation outside myself. The more I succeed in doing this, the more my enterprise and motivation grow even as my stress declines.
Ambition and motivation born of insecurity, if successful, breeds a second generation of ambition and motivation born of arrogance which, if successful, breeds a third generation of ambition and motivation born of greed. I can imagine no genealogy more disgraceful. DV
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