Ambition as Virtue

People who are arrogant and supercilious are funny to observe. They act with confidence, but their con–fidentia is built on a house of cards.

Us wiser folk watch from above as these confident dummies walk through life foolishly, making claims, posturing and signalling, striving to show their worth through pathetic, witless attempts. And they don’t see it! It’s cute. Thank God we’re better than such people.

But there is a different kind of confidence we shouldn’t snark at. I call it the confidence of a seeker.

This person stakes his claim firmly, without a shred of doubt, and yet he lets go of the outcome. And by that difference he is no longer a victim of naivety, but rather a chooser of it, and this wise and mature confidence is something we cynics ought to learn to discern from the foolish kind.

The cynic always laughs at the seeker. Yet the cynic always finds nothing, and the seeker sometimes finds something.

Ambition, similarly, becomes a good force in the hands of a seeker. The word ambition derives from the Latin ambitio. You’d know that if you were like my friend Karl, who happens to be fluent in the language.

It takes ambition to become fluent in an ancient language.

An ambitious person strives unrelentingly toward a singular outcome and such outcome-orientation is certainly full of snares. But it’s a daring thing to criticize ambition – even genuinely naive ambition – because even that is better than inaction, as articulated by Mr. Rockefeller:

“It is one thing to stand on the comfortable ground of placid inaction and put forth words of cynical wisdom, and another to plunge into the work itself and through strenuous experience earn the right to express strong conclusions.”

― John D. Rockefeller Sr., Random Reminiscences of Men and Events

But that natural confidence which comes through strenuous experience is not what’s most worthy of our attention. Instead we should focus on where it begins.

Many successful entrepreneurs, when asked what led to their success, will talk about routines and skills and principles and schemes and forget what preceded all that. The best person to learn from then is not a person who’s achieved success, but a person of ambition - he who is on the path to victory – or even the same person who won the race, from before he was crowned a victor. In fact, this version of the person is truly more successful because he is living and breathing that which he will achieve. The one who’s achieved it may have forgotten it, and therefore isn’t living what’s achieved.

To live what you will achieve is the way. It’s the ambitious and humble posture of bringing forth outcomes which rely on having that which you lack. Success doesn’t need to wait for us to first cultivate skills – that’s backwards! Success begins when we stop relying on our reliability. Only then are we free to live in the space which grants results. In other words, we acquire the wisdom to act.

It’s a great simplifier. Choose naivety. Then act with confidence, fool! Go. all. out.

Join the circus.

We’re all clowns, anyway!