Ambition..the dirty word

Ambition can be a fiend or an angel. Ambition can be likened to a spirited, speedy horse; it can carry us quickly over much ground if we keep a proper rein on it and guide it along the right road, but if given too much rein, it is in danger of landing us in the ditch.

B.C.Forbes (Founder of Forbes Magazine, 1917)

When talking about the ambitions of managers and colleagues, we often get confused. Either the person is “over ambitious or has no ambition at all!

Much as we use, respect and revile the word AMBITION, we fail to define the limit when a person has just the right amount of ambition. Do we expect each and every one to have the same amount of ambition? Or do we expect some to be very ambitious and others to hold their horses, both, just to suit our selfishly thought out script of how life should be at that particular time with that particular person?

Is being ambitious important or simply doing one’s best is good enough?

What defines the fine line between ambition and stupidity, between an angel and a fiend or between soaring to great heights and falling headlong into disaster, all due to ambition?

I think that I have confused myself enough with this debate. Flying in the air like birds must have been an impossible dream of man for centuries, now it is done regularly, and that too at twice or thrice the speed of sound. A machine which calculates a million times faster than a man was a ridiculous thought, but today our hand phones have more brain power than a dozen professors of mathematics combined. A man walking on the moon was fairy tale material till it was actually done. Looking at and talking to a person sitting a world away must have been a fantasy till just a few years ago. Now we can't imagine a world without live television, real time data transfers and video conferencing.

And all this happened because someone had a stupid ambition to do what was considered mission impossible. The guys who achieved all this did not put a rein on their ambition as the great finance guru Mr. Forbes postulated.

They let their ambition run wild. And thus, they changed the world for ever!

At the end of the day, I think ambition is a positive word, which is used to define the state of mind of people who dare and succeed in their set goals. Those who may be daring geniuses, but do not succeed are called stupid and “Over Ambitious”. There is a fine line here. Great success seldom comes at the first try. Great success at something amazingly different, achieved at the first attempt is more likely to be a lucky accident rather than real achievement. Hence, ambition needs an indomitable spirit and perseverance before one sees success. In the meanwhile, be ready to be laughed at, ridiculed and/or ignored (if you are lucky).

Mother Teresa once said, “When you are successful, you will have few real friends and many real enemies. Succeed anyway!”. In other words, let today’s failures be the foundation of future success. Be ambitious. Define and strive for your goals. You owe that to yourself and to all those who define who and what you are in God’s universe.