On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?

Lucy Kellaway in The FT

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died. 

How sad, I said. 

What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition. 

A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me. 

She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake. 

I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well. 

These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in. 

Striving for power, position or money 

I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth. 

 When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck. 

I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes. 

Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition. 

Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves. 

Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there. 

As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher! 

Aim high, but within reason 

But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you. 

What comes out of this are three thoughts. 

Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man. 

The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead. 

Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself. 

Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister. 

In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.

Some cruelest foods

Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi

In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.

All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least 100, but let me start with ten.

1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.

Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.

I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.