Ambition

Ambition

What is it like to loose your ambition?

I have lost most, maybe all, of my ambition.  This is weird.  Since I have always been a very ambitious person all of my life – so far.  Of course as an Artist, ambition is a pretty vital component of this kind of career.  I mean, without ambition how does an artist progress?  How do you survive in the shark tank that makes up most of the world that is Art, without a strong, or rock hard, sense of ambition?  Competition either raises your livelihood or sinks it.  How you deal with, handle, the competition defines success or failure.

Or, does it?

An argument with this notion might be, “The artist should work strictly for beauty, the creativity, the expression of their ideas.  Competition shouldn’t enter into it.”  Which, to me, is the dilatant’s viewpoint.  To me, a serious artist who does not feel a sense of competition with other artists is not really trying to progress or increase their skills.  This doesn’t have to be a hostile competition.  Just a serious understanding that it does exist.  The professional tennis player does not have to hate his or her opponent, but they never forget that they are trying to win and therefore defeat another person.  As is said, “That’s why they keep score.”

In order to win, each player must try their best to be better at the game than those against whom they play.  As they do their best to win, they increase their skill – to progress.  But they don’t have to hate anyone else.  They don’t have to be hostile about it. 

And, each artists needs to compete against themselves in each previous professional incarnation, as it were.  Every time I begin a new piece, I try to do it better than the last one.  I mean, what is the point otherwise?   This does not mean that any work done previously is any less valuable.  It is that each successive piece should show some sense of maybe (?) trying harder, or improvement ?  As an artist of over a half-century of effort, that to me is life.  And this is the only fraction of my own personal ambition that remains.

Isn’t this really, mostly, true of any profession, career, life work, whatever?  You maybe start in the mailroom and do your best to work your way up.

At my age and at my position, or stage, in my professional life, I just don’t care anymore.  I don’t mean this in a negative way – like in I have given up.  I am too stubborn – or stupid – too hard-headed to give up.  Even when I have proven, without a doubt, that I am just not all that good at something – like … oh say, painting – I still paint.  I still love to paint with oils on big canvases.  But I know I’m not very good at it.  I do try every time, with a new canvas, to improve, to do it better than the last one.

It’s just that I don’t care if I’m not as good as somebody else.  I don’t care if anyone else even likes what I do.  I have no ambition to prove anything.  When I was younger I had the ambition of becoming a Department Chair, a Director of This or That, a member of the School Administration, a Senior Faculty Member and Master Teacher.  Recognized and respected.  Now I just don’t care about that either.  In the past I have held all of those positions.  I have a track record of being very successful at those things.  Presently I don’t have any of that.  I’m a part time, largely ignored, bottom of the rung, teacher.  My Art is still unrecognized.  Nobody, outside of my wife and children, even knows most of what I have created.  I made it.  Everything I ever made was either sold or traded for something.  I have almost none of it in my possession. And I don’t care.

When I teach, and I have always felt this way, I teach everything I know.  No secrets, No hiding anything.  I push my students to be get better, to be better, than I am or ever was.  I want them to take what I have learned, all that I have done, and show me up.  To me, that’s how Art gets better, more exciting, more intrinsically valuable to our world at large.  That’s evolution.  “That’s the whole point of teaching.”  Students should walk away from a class and no longer need the teacher.

Is it because I have given up.  Once again, no – not at all.  I left the profession and retired for two years and when I was recruited back, I thought, “What the hell, why not.  Being retired is boring.”  So I made it clear that I did not want any position or responsibility of anything more than coming in and teaching and leaving right afterwards.  No ambition left.  And, what for.  I am no longer building a career.

That to me is one of the huge benefits of getting older.  That is, if you have tried your best and accomplished pretty much everything you set out to accomplish, why continue to hump so hard.  Not that I have become anyone of note or some kind of big shot.  I just had a sort of bucket list when I was young – maybe not a big or whoopy-dupey bucket list according to some – but it was pretty big to me.  And, as the years went along, I was always adding to it.  Then, one day I was old enough to realize that it was time for me to move over and let some younger people, with more energy, to take over. 

It just seems to be the smart thing to do.  Sooner or later every alpha gets taken down.  And, that is often a really bloody battle with the old worn out alpha getting the shit kicked out of him/her.  I say, “Walk away when you’re winning, or at least breaking even.”  The alphas who live the longest, I believe, are those that just say, “Okay, you wanna take the lead, you wanna be the first in the battle (every day), fine.  I’m gonna take a nap.”