Ambition

Time has an article about a fascinating subject: ambition. Now, note that I didn't say the article is fascinating, because it isn't. Mainstream magazines (Time, Newsweek etc.) have gone soft, much like network TV. They've lost their edge, they're too afraid of offending their base...or anyone else for that matter.

Too often they resort to reporting 'soft news' (safe topics that other media outlets have already covered) to reduce the risk of making mistakes or, and this I absolutely loathe, try and create issues where none exist. This can be through perpetuating non-issue stories (like Chandra Levy or Natalee Holloway), providing a barrage of useless data and excruciating detail around important topics (like some sports stories, for instance, or anything by shows like Geraldo) or (and this one I really dislike) what I call 'Trendiction'.

Trendiction is an attempt to spot a trend where none exists or where one is expected to happen. In most cases, it's based on analysis and projection but too often, it's plain sensationalism. The 'let's-make-a-story-because-we-need-one' is a gigantic waste of my time and sheer, sheer masturbation.

But I rant. Here are a few choice quotes from the article about ambition, which tries to shed some light one what makes some people more ambitious than others.

"A fire in the belly doesn't light itself. Of all the impulses in humanity's behavioral portfolio, ambition-that need to grab an ever bigger piece of the resource pie before someone else gets it-ought to be one of the most democratically distributed, Nature is a zero-sum game, after all. Every buffalo you kill for your family is one less for somebody else's. Given that, the need to get ahead ought to be hard-wired into all of us equally.

And yet it's not. For every person consumed with the need to achieve, there's someone content to accept whatever life brings. For everyone who chooses the 80-hour work-week, there's someone punching out at 5. Men and women-so it's said-express ambition differently; so do Americans and Europeans, baby boomers and Gen Xers, the middle class and well-to-do.

Ambition is energy and determination. But it calls for goals too. People with goals but no energy are the ones who wind up sitting on the couch saying 'One day I'm going to build a better mousetrap'. People with energy but no clear goals just dissipate themselves in one desultory project after the next.

Two of the biggest influences on your level of ambition are the family that produced you and the culture that produced your family. There are no hard rules for the kinds of families that turn out the highest achievers. Most psychologists agree that parents who set tough but realistic challenges, applaud successes and go easy on failures produce kids with the greatest self-confidence.

Wealth and poverty is another story and can be difficult to correlate to ambition level. Grow up in a rich family and you can inherit either the tools to achieve or the indolence of the aristocrat. Grow up poor and you can come away with either the motivation to strive or the inertia of the hopeless.

When measuring ambition, anthropologists divide families into four categories: poor, struggling but getting by, upper middle class, and rich. For members of the first two groups, who are fighting just to keep the electricity on and the phone bill paid, ambition is often a luxury. For the rich, it's often unnecessary. It's members of the upper middle class, reasonably safe economically but not so safe that a bad break couldn't spell catastrophe, who are most driven to improve their lot. 'It's called status anxiety' says Lowe, 'and whether you're born to be concerned about it or not, you do develop it'.