“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, rather in humility regard others as better than yourselves.”
– The Apostle Paul
“We want people who are hungry to win.”
– Jack Welch, former CEO of GE
Like many of our best conversations over the years, my dad was driving when I turned from the window and asked “Dad, are you sad that you haven’t changed the world?”
“I think I’ve changed the world through what I’ve given you," he said. "I’ve worked and earned enough so that you can have the opportunities to go out and make the world a better place. That’s enough for me.”
When I reflect on what prompted me to ask that question, I return to my fifth-grade classroom.
Throughout that year, when my attentionally-deficient-and-hyperactive brain would drift from times tables to distant worlds, I often stared at a poster on the wall. It read “Shoot for the moon because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” with a backdrop of dark space and bright stars.
My dad's life—working as an electrical engineer for a company I couldn't name at the time—didn't look astronomically successful. Had he not shot for the moon? Why not?
Did my dad live an ambitious life, or did he settle for earth because he could not reach the stars?
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Ambition is not easily defined. Among the ancients, Aristotle and Aquinas identified it as the desire for honor—the drive to live a life worthy of respect. Ambition was a sign of healthy virtue, they believed; you should seek to live an honorable life.
By contrast, moderns identify ambition with, as Webster's put it, “the ardent desire for rank, fame and power.” David Brooks calls it the “struggle to rise higher.” Nietzsche believed ambition was the expression of a deeper metaphysical drive: the urge to expand one’s power, overcome obstacles, and surpass oneself.
David Harvey says that ambition is best understood as a hunger for glory—a core human need given by God and good if directed to God, bad if directed anywhere else.
If the ancients believed ambition was the drive to receive honor from the community, moderns believe ambition is the drive to achieve success and gain power in society. Beneath both definitions lies the hunger for glory.
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If nothing else, the United States is a nation of ambition. It's the American Dream, the rags-to-riches story, the rugged individuals reaching for the moon and landing among the stars. The thread runs from Manifest Destiny through my fifth-grade classroom.
Ambition, at its best, generates energy, vision, and resilience. Abraham Lincoln is the archetype: who “rode his ambition to great heights without being consumed and corrupted by it." Martin Luther King Jr. is another—leading the Civil Rights movement in his twenties with world-changing audacity. Given our desperate need for a Lincoln or a King, it's troubling that only 2% of Gen. Z workers cite achievement, learning, or work itself as core motivations.
But ambition has costly shadows. Consider Jehoram, the ancient King of Judah, who murdered all his brothers to secure the throne. (His reign, unsurprisingly, did not go well.) Or consider this: a recent survey of 200 sociologists found that half expected to become one of the ten most important sociologists of their generation. Reaching for the stars can veer into narcissistic delusion.
When ambition becomes a ferocious drive for career success, it erodes the relationships that form the firmest foundation for durable happiness. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher quotes a young man who spoke for a generation: "Everything I've done is for career advancement…And we've done well. But we are alone in this world. Almost everybody we know is like that."
Where does that leave us? Ambition can fuel a society's progress and animate every magnum opus, but it can also morph into a consuming fire—one that burns away our loved ones and leaves only delusional self-regard.
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As I sit at my kitchen table typing this, a collection of 3D ultrasound images sits to my left—our child at 30 weeks. Like most parents, I'm convinced this baby is the most precious creature on earth.
Which brings me back to the question I once asked my father: "Dad, are you sad you haven't changed the world?"
If my child asks me this someday—and given the poster-fueled mythology of American ambition, they probably will—I want to be ready with an answer better than the one I deserved.
Here's what I'm rehearsing:
First, it's not your dad's job to change the world. That's actually good news. I can do some things—make you laugh, teach you to read, beat you at Scrabble—but I can't save the world. I can't save you or even myself. Only Jesus can do that.
Second, Jesus warns against chasing the things everyone else wants: 'fame', 'success,' becoming 'a big deal.' Instead, He calls us to pursue Him. And here's the mystery: when we put Jesus first, He promises that everything else we truly need will follow. It's counterintuitive, even paradoxical, but it's His promise. Get Jesus and we get everything else thrown in. Lose Jesus and even the good things we have begin to rot.
Third, it's perfectly fine to want to excel at something. To run faster, think deeper, build better. God planted that drive within you. The danger comes when you care more about being better than others, when "I want to be good at this" becomes "I want to be better than them." That's when ambition stops serving love and starts serving pride.
One more thing: You know that feeling when you score a goal, or ace a test, or when Mom says "good job" and you can tell she really means it? That warmth in your chest, that smile you can't suppress? That's joy. God gives you that feeling for a reason. It's a preview. A trailer for the main feature.
In heaven, you'll be your fullest self. It'll feel like you've scored a million goals, like you've finally played the perfect game. And God's delight in you—His "good job"—will be the ultimate affirmation, even better than Mom's (which is hard to believe, I know). Every good desire you have, every moment of joy you experience here, is just a shadow of what's waiting for you there.
He gives us tastes here in the valley, but we were made for life with Him in the Mountains, and it is there, not here, that we shall finally understand what we were always seeking.
(Full disclosure: my child has a 50% chance of inheriting my attention-deficit brain, which means by sentence four of this speech, I'll probably be talking to myself. But that's okay. Sometimes you need to hear your own answer before you can give it to someone else.)
How would you answer if your child asked you this question? I'd love to hear. Email me at gwishnew@christchurchil.org.
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