“And having food and raiment, let us therewith be content”. I love Paul’s writings but I do not in any way agree with the quoted statement.

Work

Here is Richard Dawkins in The Blind watchmaker:

“left to itself, …, the body tends to return to a state of equilibrium with its environment… Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work harder to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings… More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

We are alive as biological beings because our bodies do significant amount of work and does it constantly, else we would be dead. This implies that death is the norm in the universe and is staved off by work, evinced by the amount of nonliving things in the universe relative to the living things.

Work then is intertwined to our being or our existence as humans, this is why no matter how much money you have, if you do not have meaningful work you have to wake up to do, you will likely lose your mind or get yourself in trouble or both.

Ambition

Ambitions are goals, but a special sort, ambitions are outsized goals.
They are goals that are not the norm for people to achieve at the point in time of consideration, hence ambitions though a special sort of goal are bound by time, meaning they are relative in time and context.

In the 1900s, it was ambitious to attempt heavier than air powered flight, today, people who work on heavier than air powered flights – entrepreneurs, pilots and aeronautic engineers, though not doing the easiest of jobs, are not considered ambitious, heavier than air powered flight has become a norm.

The technology for building cars has been a norm for over fifty years (the modifications have been in improving the efficiency), yet when Elon Musk set out to build a new car company, though an electric one, it was considered ambitious because of the difficulty it would take to penetrate the dominant players market share.

Hence, the difficulty notwithstanding, the common factor that determines if a goal is ambitious are the odds of success. If the odds are in your favor, the goal might be difficult but the mechanics of achieving it are already well known, hence not ambitious, if the odds are not in your favor then we are talking about an ambitious goal.

Progress

We humans take a lot of the things we have at our beck and call today for granted, but a glance back only 100 years ago will bring back in stark terms just how difficult things really were. We have gotten so far only by the work ambitious people have put in to achieve what in their time seemed down right impossible.

The Wright brothers set out to achieve the seemingly impossible heavier than air powered flight and their achievements today is taken for granted when we fly over miles in just a few hours, mostly because most of us today never had to take ships over long distances.

The same will likely be the case with cars over the next 20 years, despite the vitriol thrown at Elon Musk when he started, electric cars are gradually becoming the norm. Those born in that time will likely take it for granted because they never had to experience first-hand the noise and air pollution that internal combustion engines cause.

Paul himself was not satisfied with only raiment and clothing, his works, driven by his ambition to get the gospel to the gentiles, literally spared Christianity from extinction and the faith still benefits greatly from his writings [1].

In any one area where we become satisfied, progress grinds to a halt, we stop innovating and when innovation stops, inefficiency, scarcity and high prices are not far off, which leads to suffering and sometimes war.

Progress is good for peace and quality of life, progress is not possible if we are satisfied. Ambitious people become unsatisfied with the status quo and through their work drive the human race forward one extra millimeter.

Success

Inherent in the definition of an ambitious project is that the odds are apparently against it succeeding. Yet the reason most ambitious persons pursue such projects is that they possess an ability or know-how that makes them believe they can succeed where others have failed.

However, attaining to the outcome you set out to or not, the process of pursuing an ambitious goal in and of itself transforms you into a different person, so that if you do not get to the goal (many innovations are accidental achievements of ambitious people pursuing other goals), if you fail to get the outcome you seek, you still come out net ahead, because you have gone on a path that few have, if any, and no one goes through such and remains the same[2].

What then?

Ambition then is a good thing, because it drives us to do work which if successful will likely be a significant contribution to the human race and even if not so makes us into better versions of ourselves. Settling then is not an option for the path of progress is laced with the blood and sweat of the ambitious.

Thank you for reading.

Notes

1 – In all fairness, Paul was speaking in the context of material ambitions, not social or spiritual as he was personally driven by.
2 – Though some person’s confidence might be shot after failing at an ambitious project, this is mostly a result of a single event view of the outcomes. In the aggregate they are net ahead.