David Brooks: I don’t scorn mixed motives. I live by them.

When you cover politics as I do you find yourself around a lot of highly ambitious people I don t mind it In fact I like ambitious people They re energetic trying to achieve big things taking a big bite out of life Their burning drive gives them the stamina they need to pursue their dreams year after year and stamina is a vastly undervalued superpower if you want to contribute something to the world But of curriculum ambition is both a blessing and a curse Ambitious people are also more likely to be ruthless manipulative status-obsessed and so focused on worldly success that they become hollow inside Macbeth is a play about a man who becomes a slave to ambition that insatiable destructive beast which hardens isolates and destroys him So the million-dollar questions are How can you marshal ambition s energies without being consumed by its insatiable demands How do you live a driven life seeking to achieve great things without becoming a jerk Particular sages say Don t even try You can t control ambition so you should renounce it Die to self Abandon selfish desires and offer the world a pure and selfless love This advice is not as unrealistic as it may seem I ve known a large number of people who live utterly generous lives serving the poor and the weak with great love without clamoring for applause Their lives are wondrous to behold Unfortunately countless of us and I include myself here can t seem to achieve that Sad to say my altruistic desires alone are not powerful enough to drive me through the hard labor required to do anything of note If I m going to get through the arduous work of say writing a book I need to put my egotistic desires at the institution of my loftier desires I start the book hoping it will be helpful to people but to propel me to work on it for years I also need my name on the cover and the ego-pleasing possibility that readers might think I m clever In other words if I m going to be really driven I need to harness both selfless and selfish motivations I don t scorn mixed motives I live by them I think a lot of us live this way Abraham Lincoln is the patron saint for those of us who hope to live well even in the grip of ambition Lincoln s law partner broadcasted that his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest And yet one of Lincoln s major speeches the Lyceum Address of was about the danger of overweening ambition and you get the impression he was very much worrying about his own Lincoln rode to the White House on that drive but at every step along the way you see him wrestling with his ambition as if he were wrestling with a dangerous dragon He was trying to ride his ambition to great heights without being consumed and corrupted by it This struggle with your own ambition is a perilous enterprise like Jacob wrestling with the angel I find I can better understand this struggle with the dragon of ambition if I break it down into five constituent struggles The struggle between craft and reward In his novel What Makes Sammy Run Budd Schulberg describes a belligerently self-centered and ambitious man who makes it big as a screenwriter in Hollywood The crucial fact about the main character Sammy Glick is that he doesn t care at all about the craft of screenwriting he only cares about the fame and money it can bring So he plagiarizes steals other people s ideas takes shortcuts is delighted by a script that makes money even if it s mediocre That s a crucial distinction How much are you driven by the intrinsic desire to be good at what you do How much are you driven by the desire for extrinsic rewards like money and fame that being good can bring you And preponderance crucially what is the ratio between these two motivations I d say if your intrinsic commitment to the craft isn t dominant by say - you re on morally perilous ground If you re just doing it for the money and fame you re going to cut corners You will lack a sense of calling and a true commitment to the vocation and your lack of intrinsic passion will show up in your work and life The struggle between gift love and need love In his book The Four Loves C S Lewis observes that several of our loves emerge from a fullness and particular emerge from a void If somebody poured great love into you as a child and you want to pour great love into your neighbors colleagues and products that is gift love Lewis gives the example of a character called Mrs Fidget as an example of need love She seems to be devoted to caring for her family But she s invariably boasting of her own sacrifices She s manipulative and controlling She s trying to fill a hole in her own heart so her love is self-centered not other-centered Gift love is essentially delighted with the world need love is voracious insatiable and laced with a fear of failure Gift love fosters human connection need love bends a person in on himself and leads to isolation If you re wrestling with your ambition it seems central to ask From where does my ambition flow from a sense of abundance or a sense of hollowness People whose ambition is fueled by resentment Richard Nixon and Donald Trump are fueled by need love The struggle between excellence and superiority Specific people s longings are noncomparative If they are good at something that satisfaction is its own reward Other people s longings are primarily competitive It s not enough for them to be good they need to be better than They need to come out on top of someone else Since we re such nice people we re going to tell ourselves that our longings are noncomparative But despite these noble assertions I notice there s an awful lot of competitive striving for superiority in the world Our entire meritocracy is built around the striving for superiority It s not that you re good what matters is you re ranked higher you got into a more special school The social media world is a world of vicious ranking and comparison A survey of almost sociologists identified that about half expected to become one of the the majority essential sociologists of their time Not just good but better than The world of noncomparative striving can be a world of mutual respect On the other hand a desire for superiority is zero-sum nasty and drenched in envy As Yale theologian Miroslav Volf writes in The Cost of Ambition Frustrated striving for superiority often seeks relief in the form of aggressive self-deception in which the superior is cast as morally deficient arrogant and oppressive It s not enough that I be built up others must be torn down The struggle between high and low desires The quality of your ambition will be shaped by the goal you re ambitious for As philosophers down the ages have noticed if you hunger for power you will reliably feel powerless and fear treachery if you hunger for approval you will inevitably have to be people pleasing if you hunger for money you will never have enough but if you hunger for understanding your world will inevitably be filled with wonders and if you hunger for God you will be hungering for perfect love itself and your hunger I believe will be purified by that love We all instinctively know that specific desires are morally superior to others The longing for true friendship is higher than the longing for popularity the longing for district is higher than the longing for a Porsche And yet there is a perversity in each human heart that sometimes turns us into idolaters that induces us to worship the lesser substitutes our civilization tells us to worship rather than particular ultimate good itself We want to love and be loved which is a noble ambition but we think we can get them by looking good being in the know being popular with the in crowd Idolatry is an ultimate longing for a finite thing Like all addictions this form of miswanting demands more and more of a person while offering less and less Be careful what you love St Augustine warned because you end up turning into what you love Moral life he continued is about getting your loves in the right order and wanting what is higher Completely the struggle between ambition and aspiration Ambition is the desire to rise higher in the world Aspiration is the desire to become a better person in the world The former is about social mobility and the latter is about inner transformation As you can tell I applaud ambition but aspiration sounds a lot more fundamental It takes courage to build the kind of relationships you ve never experienced before to cultivate the kind of virtues you ve never possessed before The world doesn t applaud you as much when you devote yourself to the inner sanctification rather than to outer impressiveness Aspiration demands that you renounce the merit badge life After a minimal wasted years in college Walter Kirn was stripped down to a place where he was tired of trying to get ahead all he demanded to do was learn He writes in his book Lost in the Meritocracy Alone in my room congested and exhausted I forgot my obsession with self-advancement I requested to lose myself I longed to read Instead of filling in the blanks I required to be a blank and be filled in As I was finishing this column on the train I got a nervous text from my wife She s launching a big project and she was about to send a mass email announcing it to the world She mentioned that her ambitions for this project were clashing with her quietist desires to be a private person out of the spotlight That sounds like exactly the kind of healthy internal struggle I was at that exact moment trying to describe Professional success often comes from being wholehearted from moving unreservedly after one goal But the people we admire are often divided against themselves burning hot with chosen ambition while trying to transcend the flames David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times Related Articles Gautam Mukunda Beware leaders AI is the ultimate yes-man Other voices There they go again stretching antitrust laws for political ends Erwin Chemerinksy The Supreme Court owes 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