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Ambition

It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society, holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart.

Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes.

Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable.Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.

It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments. People would have time for reflection.

Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the petition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.

Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!

It’s Never Too Late to Change

Age is no criterion when it comes to changing your life. In fact, it might be just the opposite.

The older we get, the more we must change.Change is what keeps us fresh and innovative. Change is what keeps us from getting stale and stuck in a rut. Change is what keeps us young.

This is not easy.When we are young it's easy to change and experiment with different things. The older we get the more set in our ways we become. We've found out what our comfort level is, and we all want to stay in it. We don't want to be risk takers anymore, because risk frightens us, and simply not changing seems so easy.We must fight through this. We must look fear straight in the eye and take it on. We must tell ourselves that we have too much talent, too much wisdom, too much value not to change.

I believe that Jim, who is on my staff, is one of the best assistant coaches in the country. But I almost didn't hire him three years ago because I thought that psychologically he was too "old," that he had lost the drive and passion that an assistant coach needs. Three years ago he was forty, and I thought he might have spent too many Saturday afternoons at the country club, that he wasn't going to get in the trenches anymore, like the younger assistant coaches do. But Jim told me that he couldn't wait to get down in the trenches again. So I hired him, and he's been an integral part of our success.

There is a conventional wisdom in coaching that once you've been a head coach you can't enthusiastically go back to being an assistant again and still have the same passion as before. Jim didn't buy into that. He didn't let his "old age" get in his way. He was ready when opportunity came calling. He reestablished a work ethic second to none with the eagerness of a person right out of college. And I'm thankful for what he did, because he played such an essential role in our championship season.

This is what we all must do. We must realize that it's never too late to begin making changes that can transform our life.