On Ambition

I recently had a conversation with one of my older uncles at a funeral for one of the members of his generation. I’ll have to say that my history with this uncle is rather mixed. He was one of those older people who opened up their home for large swaths of family and other miscellaneous riff raff numerous times during the years. His relative wealth allowed us all to eat and visit in comfort upon these occasions. He also had a fairly intense dislike for people under 4 foot tall – or at least for those of us who had not yet matured into adulthood (I never actually saw him interacting with a midget, so I can’t really comment on how he would have behaved under that circumstance.) In my early days, as a child, he seemed to regard me, and all others like me as disturbing little bothersome creatures. As I grew into late Jr. High school, High School and College, he began to treat me like a promising young adult. This continued into my college and graduate school years. After I’d developed a career in college education, he became a fairly indiscreet name dropper, making it clear that he knew the movers and the shakers in the college to which I’d gone to teach. I haven’t seen him since I moved away from his area. Now, some five years later, I see him at a funeral, and at the dinner afterwards he decides to cross-examine me in a very unpleasant way. I tried to give him the short version of what I do, and he immediately goes for the jugular, talking to me about how the funding works, and who is really in charge and what sorts of audits do we do to make certain the money isn’t being misused. My response is that the agency that I work for has an open state budget, we follow typical accounting procedures for a state entity, that we’ve been operating for twenty years, and that no money is paid directly to any individuals except for customary reimbursement for services rendered under budgetary restraints. He then tells me that I need to have more ambition and to find the real decision-makers and get to know them so that they’ll elevate me to a better position. At that point, I just tuned him out and got away as quickly as I could and headed to the food table. Much of the way home I was thinking about his advice and wondering why I wasn’t more ambitious. I don’t have an answer yet except to say that I’ve never really chosen any path in my life based upon how much money it would make me or how much fame I would garner from it. My passion is for helping people to become better, to make their lives better, to learn more, to grow as human beings. I don’t aspire to a better position and I really never have. I don’t know if that is the best attitude for me to have for advancement, but it sure seems like the right thing to do for me.