How To Be Ambitious Without Being A Jerk

Good to be back here. I’m not sure I’m hearing amplification. Sounds okay. Okay. Uh so, uh I’m going to give this talk on how to be ambitious without being a jerk. Uh the students here don’t need this talk. If you were a jerk, you’d be at Harvard.

Uh so several years ago, about 15 years ago, I uh was asked to be a judge uh by the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. They have a contest every year called Youth of the Year. And the Youth of the Year program honors a young person who exemplifies what the Boys and Girls Clubs can do for uh young people. And so when I came along, we just us judges, we just interviewed the finalists and there were a whole series of terrifically impressive young people whose lives had been changed by the Boys and Girls Club. And the one woman who we ended up giving the prize to, she um described her childhood and it was rough. She’d suffered abuse and violence and trauma and she wept while cry while talking about it and we didn’t know if we could give her the prize because the job is to really tell your story over and over again and we didn’t want to retraumatize her. But then we decided it’s not up to us to stop her. If she wants to do this and and she thinks she can handle it then then we should do it. But then there was a moment in the interview after the really hard parts where we asked her about her future and it was if we were bathed in light. A smile came across her face and it was one of those smiles that wasn’t only in her mouth, it was in her whole body. She started talking about what she wanted to do and she didn’t have clear plans but she knew it she wanted it to be important and she kept talking about this dream and that dream and that dream and she kept kept getting swept up in her own enthusiasm and I could see her looking out at us and I saw something I’ve seen a thousand times which was the gleam in the eye and when some young people talk about their future they just radiate this gleam and I’ve seen it on Yale kids who for whom the world is a candy store. They’ve got so many opportunities here. I’ve seen it on poor kids who um who have a sense of direction and they don’t know what they’re going to do, but they know they’re going to get the hell out of here.

And it’s that fervor and the gloom is sort of an inner enthusiasm, a yearning to make a gift out of this gift of life, life’s existence. And it’s a kind of ambition. It’s a kind of anticipation. It’s a kind of fervent desire to lead a life of consequence. And whenever I see it, I always admire the boldness of it. And it reminds me of a story I once read about a little girl who’s in elementary school and she’s drawing a picture. And the teacher asks her, “Well, what are you drawing?” And the little girl says, “Well, I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher says, “Well, nobody knows what God looks like.” And the little girl says, “Well, they will in a minute.”

And it’s that kind of confidence. I saw it. I read a memoir, a great memoir by Viola Davis, the actress, and she also had a rough childhood. And she was in high school and she went to theater class and the drama teacher said, “How many of you would like to be actors or actresses?” and every hand went up and she gets and then the actor the the teacher starts describing the life of the actor. Auditions, failure, isolation, rejection, a lot of waiting tables and hands start going down and within a few minutes every hand in the classroom is down except for Viola Davis’s and she describes the scene in her memoir. I kept my hand up staring at it. When you haven’t had enough to eat, when your electricity and heat are cut off, you are not afraid when somebody says life is going to be hard. The fear factor was minimized in me. I already knew fear. My dreams were bigger than the fear. That’s an example of the glee.

I once gave a saw a speech given in New York by Lady Gaga and she described her childhood. And she said in that speech, I suppose that I didn’t know what I would become, but I always wanted to be extremely brave and a constant reminder to the universe of what passion looks like, what it sounds like, what it feels like. And you can just picture little Lady Gaga as a girl willing herself forward. I’m a fan of Alexander Hamilton. And Hamilton, as you know, is a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from northern Manhattan. Um, if you look at that musical, it’s the Gleam in musical form for two and a half hours. If you think about those songs, I’m not going to throw away my shot in the room where it happens. I’m just like my country, young, scrappy, and hungry. Just you wait. Just you wait. It’s that anticipation. I’m going to build a future.

I’ve seen it in the middle-aged sometimes when I my kids were little and they would perform at school plays. I love to watch the parents as they were filming their kid on stage. And when they’re filming the kid behind the video camera, they’ve always got this big smile. And it’s a smile that says, “I delight in this. I intensely care about this. This matters to me.” And I’ve seen the gleam on the very old. My dad is in a senior community in Hartford, Pennsylvania. And one night we were having dinner with some friends of his. And I was seated next to a guy who’s 100 years old. And he started talking about the lectures he was attending, the books he was reading, the conversations he was having. And I imagine at 100 that guy has lost some of the original passions that guided him through life, for sex, for probably for fame, to make money. But the passion to learn stuff just doesn’t go away. And the people I admire are the people who keep growing all through their life. They’re different at 80 than they were at 70. They’re different at 70 than they were at 60. They’re different at 50 than they were at 30. They just keep growing.

And some days I think my whole worldview is built around that gleam that my political philosophy can be summarized in the question, how can we build a society in which every child gets to experience that gleam, that sense of opportunity and possibility?

Uh my personal approach to life. I’ve come to appreciate how important is the question, what are you loving right now? Love is not an emotion. Love is a motivational state. Something outside of you has entered something inside of you and set off a nuclear explosion. And it can be a person, but it can be a subject. It can be an activity, but it’s set off an energy source. And if you want to go through life, you want to go through with the big engines rumbling. And love is what does that.

And love is not rare. If you ask, if you want to know about me, ask me what I love. I love my kids, my wife, America, God, writing, my friends, New York City, the New York Mets, sorry. Uh, Bruce Springsteen’s music, Montana, Chesapeake Bay, intellectual history, my own mediocre athletic abilities practiced with great fervor.

There are certain things we feel are beautiful and good and we must hunger for them. The novelist George Elliot wrote, “Another of my heroes is St. Augustine who lived what 15,600 years ago. I’m going to paraphrase one of his favorite things sayings. Give me a man or a woman in love. Give me one who may be in the far away desert but who yearns and thirsts for the springs of passion. Give me that sort of person. She knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold person, a suspicious person, a mistrusting person, or a calculating person, he just doesn’t know what I’m talking about.” That was Augustine 1600 years ago. And Augustine said, “We’re primarily not thinking creatures, we’re desiring creatures.” And I think he was right.

I look at it this way. Some people are really who accomplish great things are smart. Some are not so smart, some are creative, not some not so creative. But every person I’ve ever met who accomplished important things had determination and stamina. They work really hard at what they did. Tom Brady, greatest quarterback in NFL history, was passed over by dozens of colleges and many NFL football teams because they measured his arm strength. They measured his foot strength, but they didn’t know he was the kind of desire guy who wanted success so badly. He was going to be able to run faster at age 40 than he could at age 20. They couldn’t open up his chest and look at his heart. And to me, that’s what you look at.

Now, this is the point in the talk where people who know me say, “David, you’re talking about Lady Gaga, Viola Davis, Alexander Hamilton. These are big electric personalities. I know you. You do not have a big electric personality.” And it’s true. When I used to give talks and my speaking agency would send the hosts this introduction for me where that they could read out and would capture my facts and they were supposed to read it and it the introduction ended with David Brooks is a social critic who introduces audiences to the problems of our time with insight and quiet passion and I was supposed to get up when I heard the word quiet passion that was the end of the intro. And I came to hate that phrase, quiet passion, cuz basically my agency was telling the audience, don’t expect Mr. Charisma here. That’s what Quiet Passion means. And I was like, dull fun. Quiet passion is like dull fun. Like, who would want to have sex with somebody with quiet passion when you could have the loud kind? Like, that would be better.

And so, that’s just who I am. I’m the guy, you know, you go to the grocery store and you the automatic doors are supposed to open for you. They don’t know I’m there. Just no charisma. But I’ve come to like quiet passion that I’m not a big charismatic Lady Gaga kind of person. But I do have some desires and they don’t flow like fireworks, but they flow like a river, a slow river.

And so, for example, you could say one of the things I love is writing. When I was seven, I read a book called Paddington the Bear and I decided I was going to become a writer. And I’ve written every day in the 50 odd years since that day. Seven days a week, 365 days a year. My wife, when we were married, she thought we were going to have these nice leisurely breakfasts and reading the New York Times together. I don’t talk to another human being until I’ve written 1,200 words. So, I’m in there from 7:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. generally. I used to wear a Fitbit and it told me I was napping. But I wasn’t napping. I was just doing what I was put on this earth to do. And I guess my heart rate goes down.

And so that’s my quiet passion. My moral philosophy is also built around the gleam. I’m a big fan of a book that was written in 523 by a Roman senator who was sentenced to death named Boethius called On the Consolation of Philosophy. And he said when you’re orienting your life, it should be around some ultimate ideal. It should not be around a lesser thing. He wrote, “Do you want to pile up large sums of money? Where will you get it if not from those who have it? You want honors? How will you obtain them except for by begging for them by those who can have it? You want power, you will lie awake worrying about your own vulnerability.”

He said, “If you desire small and finite things, your life will be desperate and you’ll never get what you want.” 1500 years later, David Foster Wallace gives an address at Kenyon College, a famous commencement, and he essentially makes the same point. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And you would better worship God or some ideal or some noble truth because pretty much everything else you worship will eat you alive. You will worship money, you’ll feel you never have success. If you worship looks, those will go away. If you worship power, you’ll feel vulnerable and powerless. So both men separated by centuries and different sensibilities made the same point. We are infinite creatures designed for infinite longings.

Wanting the finite things like a good car, a nice meal, totally fine. But if you orient your life around them, you’re orienting in the wrong way. And for some people, that’s God. God is infinite. But for me, if I look at human nature, I look at things almost all human beings want and they’re infinite. We all want belonging. We want to love and be loved. And if you love someone, there’s no end to that. It’s infinite. We all want to understand things to learn about the world and the truth is infinite. It’s not like you arrive at the end of the truth and you understand everything. There’s no ending to that. We all want respect. We want to be admired by people whose admiration is worth having. That too is infinite. We all want competence. We want to get better at the stuff we do.

I walk by a a stairway outside the post office in Washington DC near where I live and there always kids on skateboards trying to learn how to do tricks on the stairway in the railings and they’re falling falling falling but they want to get better. I think we all want to get better whether it’s gardening or cooking whatever we want to do we want to get better at that thing. The desire for significance the desire to have a sense of meaning and purpose in our life. I’m a believer in Victor Frankl whose book Man’s Search for Meaning that the ultimate motivator for human beings is the desire to have a sense of purpose and meaning. He was in the concentration camps and he found the people who had no sense of purpose and meaning they died. And today when you look at suicides very often it’s because people have no sense of purpose and meaning.

So these are noble things. We’re not just wanting things belonging uh respect dignity these are infinite things. These are eternal virtues you can orient your life around if you want these things and your desires are pointing you in the right direction. And I find life goes better when I’m gripped by that kind of infinite desire.

There was a song early church guy Gregory of Nyssa in early days of the Christian church. He said all the philosophy around me is about rest. I solve a problem I can relax. And Gregory of Nyssa says how can that be? If God is infinite and if I can understand and know God, that must mean he’s finite. And so Nyssa says, “No, it can’t be. We want rest. We want endless searching. We want endless growth.” And he’s a beautiful commentary on the Song of Songs, which is the sexy love part of the Bible. And it’s about desire, a desire for a woman. And when he comes closer, the lover, she withdraws and he chases after and she withdraws and he chases after. Uh, and each time he chases after, he reaches further and falls further in love. He knows more about her. And as his desire for her intensifies and this says the best kind of life is endless longing. In fact, he says heaven is endless longing.

As a Jew, I always had trouble with the Christian idea of heaven like paradise. Like if you’re in paradise, what’s left to do? And so I like Gregory of Nyssa. It’s endless longing. And if that’s true in the religious sense, it’s true in the secular sense. Marcel Proust, the great novelist, was on his deathbed. He was in agony and dying and really in pain. And a thought occurred to him that one of the scenes in his great novel Remembrance of Things Past, I think it was a scene about death. He was like, “Oo, I got that wrong.” And so he says to his sister, “Bring me my manuscript.” And he’s within hours of death, racked by pain, he rewrites the scene. I kind of like that.

Paul Cezanne, the artist, he knew he wanted to become a painter pretty much his whole life. He goes to Paris as a young man, fails. Tries to get into the Grande Ecole where he can learn to paint, fails. Has to go back, works at his dad’s bank, then goes back to Paris to try again, and he fails. He goes back to Paris, he stays there. His paintings were rejected by the salon to Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continues to submit paintings 1864 to 1882 and everything is rejected. Finally, he’s in middle age, what should be his peak years as an artist, and he decides, I’m going to stop showing. My work is not good enough. I’m not even going to try. So, he does seven or eight years where he doesn’t show anything. And then his childhood friend was a guy named Emile Zola who had become a great writer. And around this time when Cezanne is not showing his work, Zola, a really good friend, writes a book called The Masterpiece. And it’s about two childhood friends, one of whom is a famous novelist who goes on to wealth and glory and the other whom is a failed painter who commits suicide. And he sends Cezanne this novel, and says, “Hey, I wrote a book about us.” And Cezanne never speaks to him again.

Uh but at age 56, Cezanne has his first one-man show. Then a couple years later, his works are being bought. He has a show in the museum in Berlin and suddenly people are beginning to notice and he’s getting better. And his biographer wrote that what motivated him through all those dark years, the French word was inquietude. I’m translating it in quietude, which is restlessness, which is drive, which is growth, growth, growth. He writes to his son a month before his death at age 67. I want to tell you that as a painter, I’m becoming more clairvoyant to nature. That is always very difficult to me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess the wonderful richness and color that animates nature. So he’s just trying to capture what he sees. And he’s 67. He’s about to die. He’s still pushing onward. And after he dies, they recognize who he was. And Picasso says, “Cezanne is the father to us all.” Really the foundation of modern art. And so that guy just kept growing.

Another guy, Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist who was in college. He did not do well and he thought about leaving. So he dropped out of school and started a little jazz club which was hard. Uh but he made the bills pay and he was at a baseball game one year or one day and he sees a batter hit a double and a thought pops into his head, you know, maybe I should write a novel. So he closes the jazz club and starts writing and as he’s writing he realizes I’m getting fat around the middle because I’m not working the club anymore. So he says I should take up an exercise. So he thinks the best exercise is running. It’s cheap. You can do it alone. So he starts running and he’s the kind of guy when he commits to something he really commits. So he runs six miles a day, six days a week. He starts running marathons over the next 20 years 23 years. He runs in 23 marathons, many other long-distance races, ultramarathons, and a bunch of triathlons.

He’s a fanatic about it. And he writes a book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what you notice in this book is the guy hates running. Here are some sentences. As I ran this race, I felt I never ever wanted to go through that again. Around 23 miles, I start to hate everything. I finally reached the end of the race. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. It was draining physically, as you can imagine. And for a while afterwards, I swore I’d never run again. So, why does he do something he hates?

Well, in part because he believes life is about effort and getting better. He was a mediocre runner in his best days, but it was he just wanted to keep getting better and he felt this act of slightly getting better and better at running helped him get slightly better and better at writing. He said being a tough runner makes me a tough writer and so I run because I like to write. And he writes, um, let’s see if I can find this passage. Oh, here it is. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, man, this hurts. I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is unavoidable. Whether you can stand up anymore is up to you. And he writes at the end, uh, exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits. That’s the essence of writing and a metaphor for life. And he writes in that book, I already know what I’m going to put on my gravestone. At least he never walked. And so he’s a guy driven by that same kind of passion.

Uh unfortunately, there are things in our culture that squash that kind of passion. I’ll just mention a few forces. The first is overintellectualization. Thinking everything is about brain power, everything is about intelligence, everything is about information and underemphasizing motivation and desire. Kids have incredible desire to learn. There were study done by a woman named Susan Engel. The average three-year-old asks uh 104 questions per hour. And those of us who have been parents have been through that. Then they get to school in their kindergarten and the teachers, they all in principle like curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. And if kids start asking questions, they can’t get through the lesson plan. So they subtly send the message, no questions. And Susan Engel was sitting in the back of a class and part of a research and she hears a she’s in a science room and the kids have found one of those old-fashioned scales that go up and down and they’re figuring they’re playing with it. They’re trying to figure out how it works. And the teacher says to them, “Okay, kids, enough that enough of that. I’ll give you time to experiment at recess. There’s no time for experiments now. We’re doing science.”

And so in her research, she finds by first grade, it’s not 104 questions an hour, it’s 2.3 questions an hour from the entire class. And by fifth grade, it’s 0.48 questions per hour. And she writes that if you lose your curiosity at age 11, you don’t get it back.

And so that’s one way we crush. The second is what you might call the spirit of calculation. If you take young people and put them in a system where you’re competing for grades, for rankings, for admissions, and you’re introducing, you’re putting them in a system where they have to game the system to win. Tell me if this sounds familiar to anybody. And so they become cynical about the system. They become shrewd animals trying to calculate how can I game the system. Their parents become shrewd animals figuring out how to game a system to get admissions into places like this. And pretty soon that calculating part, which is really about calculating time and resource management, how much can I devote to this? It begins to take over your brain.

Let me I love teaching. I’ve been teaching here since the 90s. I love this place. But I’m going to tell you about my worst moment as a Yale teacher. It was about 10 years ago. I was teaching only seniors that time, undergrads, and it was the last day of spring term. In fact, I think I taught into the reading week. And I asked students, okay, this is your last time in a college classroom for all of you. This is the last time you’ll ever be in a college classroom. So, what book have you been assigned over the last four years here that changed your life? And there was a long pause and one of the students finally said, “Professor Brooks, you have to understand how we read here.” I just read enough to get through class. I don’t read with a kind of passion, intensity that would allow a book to change my life. And another student said, “Yeah, but I was assigned some books that I think could change my life, and I’ve set them aside to read after college.” I felt like saying, “If you didn’t read in college, I’m not sure you’re going to read it after college.”

And that was a sign to me that they were doing energy resource calculations and they weren’t finding some book that just captured them and then devoting the next three weeks to it, which is what you need to do if you’re really going to be swept away if you’re going to feel fall in love with a book. They were detached.

The third way to crush passion and the gleam is through what you might call technological sloth. I mentioned it takes hard work to achieve anything big. The paradox is people who put out effort dream higher. If you put out effort to something, it’s a sign you care about it and you begin to care more about the things you put out effort into. What is technology? It’s a way to reduce effort in pursuit of optimization. Uh it’s emotionally easier to text someone than to have a conversation. It’s easier to read a tweet than a book. It’s easier to read an or to look at an Instagram reel than read a poem. It’s easier to ask Claude than to write your own paper. It’s this huge invitation toward intellectual and spiritual sloth.

And my fear for AI and nobody knows anything about AI and I don’t know any claim to know more than anybody else is that the 10 or 20% of humanity that likes to think will use AI to power their thinking and they will be really impressive. But the 80% of humanity that doesn’t like to think will use it to substitute for thinking and we will get a wider chasm between the people who are privileged and the people who are not and who are exhausted and it’ll be not only an economic chasm but a cognitive chasm and so that also drains away passion.

The fourth force is loss of faith is despair. The 21st century has been rough. There’s been a lot of loss of faith. The Iraq war caused us to lose faith in American capacity to project goodness abroad. Financial crisis caused us to lose faith in unregulated capitalism. The internet caused us to lose faith in the idea that if we only communicated with each other, we would all get along. And the collapse of social trust has caused us to lose faith in each other. And the most severe kind of lost faith is loss of faith in the future. 69% of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream. If you don’t have faith in the future, if you don’t see an avenue for yourself to opportunity, toward meaning, that’s going to diminish your expectations. You’re going to have a sense that I don’t control my life. The system is controlling my life and I don’t have agency here.

And so what you get with all these spiritual poisons the sloth the loss of faith the calculating nature is you get a lot of people who come especially coming out of school don’t know what their heart really wants. They don’t know the deepest passion of their soul.

Uh and so what happens is there’s a series of things you do. 80% of college graduates in America say they don’t know what they want to do. I had a professor at Chicago named Leon Kass who said what distinguishes people is not their beliefs. It’s not their geography. It’s not even their ethnicity. It’s the ruling passion of their soul. Some people are lovers of understanding. Some people are lovers of pleasure. Some people are lovers of justice. But the ruling passion of the soul shapes them and determines where they’re going to go in their life and how far they’re going to go. But a lot of people, they haven’t yet figured that out.

And so there’s a bunch of options. There’s a guy at Stanford named William Damon who studies this. First option is foreclosure. You pick the first job that comes along whether it’s right for you or not. And I recently ran into a young man at Williams College. He got offered a job at Bain & Company after his freshman year. He was 19. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. But job security, he took it. Foreclosure. The second is disengagement. About a quarter of people lower their ambitions. They just think, “I’m not going to set myself up for disappointment.” The third is uh dreamers. Another quarter of the people, Damon says, are dreamers. They have vague ambitions, but no concrete plan. I want to do something creative. That’s a vague ambition. It’s not a life. Finally, and the most common reaction is conformity. I do what the world tells me is high status.

And this can absolutely happen to everybody. It can happen even to Michelle Obama. In her book, Becoming, she describes she’s at Princeton. She doesn’t know what she wants to do, but Harvard Law School sounds kind of impressive. So, she goes to Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer and then becomes a lawyer in Chicago. And she writes in that book, “I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was pretty good at it.” This was a distressing thing to admit given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken a wrong turn. And even Michelle Obama was estranged from her own heart.

Uh and so this is a loss of energy, a loss of vitality, a loss of national life. And so when you get this happening on a mass level, a loss of faith, what you end up with is a society with a lot of nihilism in it, a belief in nothing. A belief that whatever is lower is more real. All these lofty dreams about love, that’s all a mirage.

And this is the language Donald Trump speaks. And you end up with leaders who don’t arouse the bright passions, the desire for belonging, competence, enjoyment. Meaning you get a lot of leaders and a lot of a national culture that is directed toward the dark passions, the unhealthy passions. And those are things like anger. Anger is fine in short doses, but when it becomes a permanent state, it’s very corrosive. Hatred. You can be angry at someone you love, but hatred is rejection of their entire person. And there’s a lot of hatred in America today. Resentment. Resentment is about status. It’s the belief that somebody doesn’t recognize me. Finally, the urge to dominate, libido dominandi, which is the urge to have power over others. There’s a lot of that going on.

And so, we are in a state where a lot of people have lost faith and we’re in a swirl of these dark passions. So, you’d think the way to solve this entirely is just there’s a like an easy solution. Get rid of the dark passions, fall in love with stuff, and then your life will be great. And I recommend that as a first step. Orient yourself to the desires of your own heart, the ruling passion of your own soul. And this, by the way, is not an easy thing to find out because it’s happening unconsciously for most people until something touches you.

I had that moment reading Paddington Bear. My daughter was five. She got invited to a birthday party at a hockey rink and for the she spent the rest of her life till today playing and coaching hockey. She just felt home at home. This is my home. This hockey rink is my home. She felt that at five. Albert Einstein when he was four, his dad gave him a compass and he saw this invisible forces of the universe are moving this needle. Maybe I’ll study the invisible forces of the universe. You became Albert Einstein.

I saw an interview Annie Dillard did with a painter and she asked her, “Why’d you become a painter?” And the painter said, “I just love the smell of paint.” It can be very aesthetic or you discover that thing that touches you. And sometimes it starts small, but then it grows and takes over your life.

Unfortunately, that’s a start, but it’s not enough. If we could just fall in love with stuff and then lead pure lives, that would be great. But most of us can’t do that. Most of us don’t live in pure worlds. I’m in media. I went into media because I like to tell the truth and make a point. But I got to generate clicks. A lot of people go into politics because they want to do some good for the world. They’ve got to win elections. A lot of people go into design a product and they want to build some great product. They got to get market share. The world is filled with compromises you have to make in order to get what you really want.

Secondly, I wish I didn’t need ambition. I wish I could just rely on my good-hearted altruism. And yet, I may start out to write a book because I think I have something to say or there’s a question I want to investigate. But writing a book is really hard. It takes me four years to write these books. And I don’t think I would have interest and passion enough to do it if I didn’t know my name was going to be on the cover. I like it when people think I’m clever. And I need that kind of shallow motivation to get me going. And I have to make a living. This is how I make a living. And so I have mixed motivations. I have some good motivations to serve the world and make a point. But I have some pretty selfish motivations to people think I’m clever and make some money. And those mixed motivations mix with the noble motivations into a cocktail that’s very hard to separate.

And so if we’re going to acknowledge that we have mixed motives, both the altruistic positive desires and also the normal selfish desires, you got to wrestle with those two so you’re not corrupted by your own selfish desires. And so Abraham Lincoln, his first speech was about ambition. His partner says in him, ambition was a little engine that knew no rest. He was an extremely ambitious guy, but he knew he could be corrupted by ambition and for his desire for power. And so he wrestled with his ambition. He wrestled with it.

And I think of the wrestling match as a bunch of little wrestling matches. The first is the wrestling match between craft and reward. There’s a novel called What Makes Sammy Run? written I think in the 50s and there’s this sleazy character named Sammy Glick and he wants to be a screenwriter but he doesn’t give a damn about the craft of screenwriting. He just wants money and fame and so he’ll plagiarize, he’ll cheat, he’ll steal people’s ideas as long as he can get money and fame. He is someone who has failed the wrestling match. It’s all about the extrinsic rewards.

Another struggle is between wanting and loving. When a man wants a woman, he wants to possess her. When a man loves a woman, he wants to honor her. Wanting flows from a void. I hope some of you have seen the great movie Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. That’s about a guy who lost his family when he had a kid. He desperately had a void where parental love should be and he spent the rest of his life trying to make money, become famous, amass power so he could fill that void. And in so doing, he made himself unlovable and could never fill the void of the thing he wanted most. And he led a miserable, lonely life.

There’s a guy living in Washington near me who was like that. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue just down.

Uh the struggle between comparative and non-comparative excellence. Some people just want to be good, but other people want to be better than. And once you’re in the better than business, you’re in the envy business and you’re in the resentment business. And resentment is a passion that is a total poison on your soul. When you’re in resentment business, not only are you envying the other person, but you adopt a sour grapes mentality. I don’t even want that stuff anyway. That’s for shallow people. I never wanted that stuff. So, you take the thing that’s of high value and you devalue it in your own mind. When you’re in the resentment business, you don’t even want to know about the world. You just curl in on yourself and convince yourself that you’re better than all the other people who have that thing.

And resentment. There’s a historian a philosopher Max Scheler from the early 20th century who wrote beautiful books on what a poisonous plant resentment is once it flows within you.

Um, and then finally there’s the struggle between ambition and aspiration. Ambition is good. I like ambition as you can tell. But aspiration is more important. Ambition is the desire to try to achieve something else out in the world. Aspiration is the desire to become a better person in the world. So ambition is about something external. Aspiration is about something internal. How do I purify my heart? How do I resist my temptations? How do I fight my sins? And I wrote a book about that uh called The Road to Character. And for anybody who’s thinking about getting it, I learned writing that book that writing a book on character doesn’t actually give you good character. And even reading a book on character doesn’t give you good character, but buying a book on character. I recommend that.

And some days it seems like a miracle when you think about all the forces in society that crush our ambitions. When you think about the way ambition itself is potentially corrosive with all the wrestling with the dragons that you have to do then it’s amazing that there are any adults who are the kind of people I admire who keep growing who are fully engaged fully enthusiastic and yet I see them all the time.

Murakami. Uh Cezanne. Uh one of the most remarkable books I read recently was Tina Turner’s memoir. Tina Turner, you know, grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee. She had a mom who left something to be desired. Bit narcissistic. She struggled in school. She had undiagnosed dyslexia, but she could sing. And one day she’s singing in a club and there’s a guy in the audience who’s already famous named Ike Turner. And those of us of a certain age know the story. Ike looks at her and says, “There’s my million dollars. I’m going to form an act. Ike and Tina review. I’m going to give her her name. Her name was not really Tina Turner. I gave that to her and licensed it.” So Tina Turner didn’t even own her own name.

And they have an act. And then he starts beating her. And he was a guitarist. He didn’t want to hurt his hands. So he took these wooden shoe stretchers and he jammed her in the face. Then he starts raping. Then he starts having mistresses with every person he can meet. And at one point, Tina’s keeping home and four of his mistresses are living in the home and she has to clean up after them. Their wedding day, he takes her to a civil court in Tijuana, Mexico. There’s no dress. There’s no kissing. There’s just signing a document. And then that night he takes her to a sex show.

Uh and she wrote that uh sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility, a kind of rape, especially when it began or ended with a beating. So this is the worst guy. And she decides that I’ve had enough. And she takes sleeping pills. And this was not a bid for attention. She really wanted to die. She was disappointed when she woke up in the hospital.

Uh and then she said every David Whyte the poet says every person comes to a place at one time or another in their maturation of complete loss and deadness a stark and frightening absence of creativity and enthusiasm when life seems to retreat away like a tide. And what you have to do, Whyte says, is find the original child you used to be. He writes, “In effect, somewhere inside of us, the child is still running enthusiastically toward the horizon it once glimpsed. Our future life depends on finding this original directional movement in our lives, no matter how far we feel we are from it, and no matter how far we are into middle age.”

So after the suicide attempt, Tina Turner decided, I’m going to build the kind of person who can stand up to Ike Turner. And so secretly, she creates two Tinas. There’s Ike’s Tina. She’s still nursing him and feeding him, dwelling, all that stuff. And then she’s going to create her own version of herself. She does a lot more reading. She starts meditating. She keeps a journal. And she’s developing her own voice. And it takes her 14 years.

But one day, they’re in the back of a limo going to some show. And Ike starts cursing at her. And she does something she’d never done before. She starts cursing back. He beats her. She does something she’s never done before. She punches back and they get out of the limo at the hotel. She gets out. Her pants suit is covered in blood. And that night she pretends to be Ike’s Tina. She cleans him up. She feeds him. But in the middle of the night she sneaks out of the hotel, goes out the back entrance so the entourage won’t see. Runs across a highway, nearly gets killed by a truck, goes to a Ramada Inn and says to the manager, “I have no money. I have nothing. Can you let me stay here for a night?”

And at age 40, she breaks off and does something that most people in the music business are getting out of the music business at 40. She decides to launch a solo career as a sexy rock star at age 40. And she succeeds fantastically. So at age 70, she’s selling out 180,000 seat arenas in Brazil. And she marries another guy and she designs a wedding with 180,000 roses, which sounds like a lot of roses, but she remade herself.

And that’s someone who in the worst circumstances could have been filled with resentment. She decides, I’m going to seize life. And that’s the gleam in a 40-year-old and a 50-year-old and a 60-year-old and a 70-year-old.

And when you find that, you find so many people living lives of pure meaning. I’ll close with this story. I read about it in a book by a friend named Emily Esfahani Smith and it’s about a girl named Kate who at 14 was hit by a car and suffered a severe brain injury and she was rushed to Stony Brook Hospital on Long Island and multiple surgery, rounds of therapy, long recuperation. Four months later, she returns to Stony Brook to have one more operation on a piece of her skull that needs to be adjusted. And so she has the operation, is successful, she’s in the room, her own room recuperating, and a guy walks in and he says, “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the physician uh in the emergency room the day you originally came in, the day of the accident.” And he leaves and somebody else comes in and says, “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the nurse who was there in the original operating team and started working on you on the day you came in.” Couple minutes later, somebody else comes in. “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the chaplain on duty when you came in. I spent time with your parents.” And after the six or seven person comes in, Kate’s dad goes out to one of the nurses say, “What’s going on here? Why are all these people coming into her room?” And the nurse said, “For every 10 kids we see with this injury, nine of them die. There’s only one Kate. We need to come back. We need to see her. Because she is what keeps us coming to work every day.”

And those are people who endure some suffering in that hospital, but they’re living lives of passion and meaning. And it’s a model. Thanks very much.