Ardency

“Be humble in all things but ambition.”  I spy these words while stopped at a traffic light at the intersection of Michigan and Congress.  I love this spot, engine idling; it’s the moment in my end to end drive of this short east-west link between the expressway and the lake when I anticipate bursting out of the shadows of Chicago’s tightly packed high-rises and into the light-filled expanse of infinity offered beyond Buckingham Fountain at Lake Michigan’s shore.

It’s been a while since I’ve tackled the topic of ambition. I have to look up the definition (again).  I search frenetically, in all its iterations, for the hint of negativity, puzzled evermore by the connotations put upon this combination of letters that have turned it into a source of shame for women, and become synonymous with the demise of integrity when it spawns destructive and selfish greed.

 

Ambition [am-bish-uh-n] noun:  a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.

 

What is so wrong with the spirit of this quest, and do we need to sacrifice our humility to embody it?

  

Ambition has long been a dirty word for women. With the exception of short periods during wartime in the early 20^th century, women slowly leaked into the workforce, initially allowed positions mimicking roles at home:  Servant responsibilities keeping male executives organized, maintaining their schedules, bringing them coffee, the unsung heroes keeping everything moving. Millennials may be surprised to know their grandmothers were forced to quit work when they got pregnant, and for some even getting married meant the end of a paying job.  The woman’s priority was supposed to be the home.  Women may not have been “allowed” to have ambitions outside the home, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t.

A loved one suggests to me that maybe women who want to fulfill themselves in the workforce, whether years ago or even still today, could not do so without ambition.  The barriers and social pressures are fierce.  Ask any woman who’s held a full-time job while raising a family:  It’s easy to crowd this space with the demands of traditional womanhood:  Wife, mother, homemaker, volunteer.  Without a burning fire from within to achieve, would many just give up?  The glass ceiling is not broken without determination and hard work; the very definition of ambition.

 

Ambition is not defined as actually doing or achieving something, but as the strong desire to do so. Nor is it defined as the measures one takes to do or achieve, yet somehow over the course of time we have hijacked the definition and decided it is associated with the tack employed to reach a goal, particularly negatively. It’s portrayed in movies like “Wall Street” as the ruthless hunt for wealth and power.

Ambition itself is neither positive nor negative, it is a driving force keeping us focused on achievement of our goals, no matter what those goals are.  Ambition is not limited to the pursuit of money or status.  It applies in the pursuit of anything meaningful to us that does not come easily.  It’s what keeps us in the parenting game, searching for ways to reach our teenagers during those dark years of incommunicado.  It’s what keeps us in a relationship with our partner seeking understanding when we don’t see eye to eye.  It’s what enables us to move seemingly impenetrable roadblocks, to find a new path, to open windows when a door closes, to look inside ourselves and embrace our flaws, to do something that scares us, to sit in our pain in order to move forward. It’s that slow fire burning within us that fuels the courage to put ourselves out there and be all we are meant to be.

Do we need to check our humility at the door in order to embrace ambition?  Only if to build ourselves up with some empowering self-talk.  Pursuing ambition is scary.  It means we need to believe in ourselves and our ability to achieve what it is we so intensely desire.  But our humility is crucial on the quest to fulfill our ambitions.  It helps us maintain integrity and a healthy regard for those around us, and more than anything it holds us close to those individuals who mean the most to us.  For without them, our success is meaningless.