#365DaysOfWriting – Day Fifty-Four
Ambition. Passion or poison?
It’s a double-edged sword. While a good thing to have, there’s always the danger of falling too far down the rabbit hole. I identify myself as a moderately ambitious person – I enjoy my job and I get excited about working on new projects, but I always make it a point to try and have a work-life balance. I’m in no hurry to win a ‘race’, or whatever it is people seem to be chasing. I have immense respect for those who chose that path, it’s a difficult one, but I don’t see myself going down that route.
A couple of movies that I had in mind have ambition as a theme – ambition that leads to greed.
Wall Street: ‘Greed is good’, a phrase immortalised by Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), has a big influence on young Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen). Gekko’s ‘ambition’ for money hoodwinks Bud into chasing the rabbit down the hole. Eventually though, the ambition to get richer spirals out of control, loved ones start getting hurt and it all goes pear-shaped. This film teaches us an important lesson – money isn’t the root of all evil, the ambition to get more than what’s necessary is. And you need to be ruthless and without remorse to get what you want.
Macbeth (2015): There have been many adaptations of Shakespeare’s classic tragedy, and all of them have had the same ‘consequences of greed’ theme. But none of them show it with as much raw brutality as Justin Kurzel’s version (Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood comes close). Michael Fassbender, in the titular role, and Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth, show us what it takes to play the dirty game, to behave like the absolute dregs of human society to get to the top. But there’s one thing here that’s missing in Wall Street – remorse. Gekko shows none of it, while Macbeth and his wife realise the folly of their ‘ambitious’ ways a little too late. But there is a realisation.
As always, there is another side to ambition.
Ambition gives you a goal to aspire for. Otherwise, what’s the point of just going through the motions in life. Many people subscribe to that line of thought, but although I have a devil-may-care attitude on most occasions, I believe that you need to have SOME goal in mind. Let’s take football for instance – the whole point of the game is to get the ball into the goal. And the forward line needs to have that predatory instinct, that ambition to score goals.
The MSN trio (Messi-Suarez-Neymar) of Barcelona is a great example – their ambition has seen them score a staggering 90 goals in the La Liga alone in 2015–2016. This is where ‘greed’ comes in handy.
