No One’s Looking (2010)
Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in. —Bill Bradley
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Erg. Monday. Time to find the ambition for getting up, again, and doing more of the same things we did last week in an effort to achieve a goal that may or may not make us happy. I’m not a particular fan of hip-hop, but in the back of my mind I can hear Rick Ross in a continual loop, “Every day I’m hustlin’, hustlin’, hustlin’.” Motivation often needs to be kickstarted on a Monday morning and some weeks it’s everything we can do just to put on pants. That’s when we have to stop and ask ourselves, “Why? Why must we put on pants? Why can’t our ambition, and our bodies, be naked?”
Well, okay, there is that whole legal thing about indecent exposure. Starting the week off in jail might do more to kill one’s ambition than fuel it, but at least it would make the Monday interesting. Naked ambition, though, is a different matter. Strip away the pretense and excuses that make our ambition socially acceptable and admit that what we really want first and foremost is to make enough money so that we don’t have to be so damn ambitious. Yeah, sure, save the world, feed the children, house the homeless, etc. That all sounds good, but that all requires funding so isn’t it better to tackle the money issue first by making as much of it as possible?
Yes, I know, there’s more to life than money. That’s a lesson learned long ago. However, to pretend that our pursuits are not, at least in part, financially motivated is to gut any altruism attached to our ambition. By all means, do good things! Yes! Be generous and kind and loving to all! But let’s be honest: doing good from a position of penury has its limits. By bettering our own condition, we put ourselves in a place where we can make a difference on a much larger scale. There’s nothing wrong with naked ambition, and sometimes being naked is just the thing to get us where we want to go.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Let us take, for example, supermodel Karlie Kloss. Ambition? Not only does she maintain one of the busiest runway schedules on the planet, she poses for multiple designer campaigns a month, appears most months in no fewer than three magazine editorials, operates her own charity, bakes her own vegan chocolate chip cookies, and still somehow finds time to hang out with BFF Taylor Swift.
Arguably, one of the most defining moments in Kloss’ career was a 2011 editorial in Vogue Italia shot by Steven Meisel. While this wasn’t the first time Karlie appeared naked in an editorial, it was certainly the one that garnered the greatest amount of attention. Unflinching, at least publicly, the model said:
“I think they’re beautiful photos and I’m very proud of all of them. I’m happy with the results … I think that they’re photos that are hopefully going to become iconic.”
Karlie’s not the only one to take such ambitious steps. Amber Rice, the model in today’s picture, is one of many I’ve watched pull up roots from the Midwest and move to Los Angeles on her own driven by a desire to succeed in ways that simply are not possible in Indianapolis. Some make it, some don’t, but at least they had the ambition to shed themselves of the excuses that hold the rest of us back. Blame it on youth if you want, but they set a strong example.
So, let’s kick this Monday in the backside and get something done, shall we? There’s really no excuse and pants (and tops) are totally optional.[/one_half_last]
Ambition
INTENSITY (2012)
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.—Helen Keller
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]There is something seriously wrong with the world when schools inspire and encourage fear and suspicion rather than learning and ambition. Fear and suspicion lead to remission, fighting, and ultimately war. Learning and ambition lead to cooperation, understand, and progress. That there is anyone in the world who promotes the negative over the positive is a point of concern, but when it is the institutions we entrust to teach and prepare the next generation,  we should be furious.
On Monday of this week, news broke of a 14-year-old student at MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas who was arrested for making a clock for his engineering class. Ahmed Mohamed is a young man of Sudanese descent. In fact, his father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, ran for President of Sudan earlier this year. The whole purpose of putting Ahmed in the Texas school was to encourage his ambition in science and technology. Unfortunately, when Ahmed’s English teacher saw the briefcase containing the clock, he didn’t bother to ask the student what it was. Instead, the teacher made the false assumption that it must be a bomb and reported Ahmed to the principal, who in turn called the police.
I find it interesting that this happened at a school named after the late five-star general, Douglas MacArthur. The tough-as-nails general with a reputation for pushing his troops to their very limit, for accepting nothing short of victory, would almost certainly be embarrassed by the school. General MacArthur once said,
The general understood that fear is always the enemy, and that ambition and learning are the solution.
School principal Daniel Cummings (972.600.7370, dacummings@irvingisd.net) made a grave error in choosing to punish Ahmed for his ambition, and deserves to be held accountable for such an egregious mistake. Fortunately, more intelligent forces across the country have attempted to make up for the school’s inadequacy. Tech giant Google invited Ahmed to it’s tech fair this weekend. Facebook founder, and soon-to-be-dad, Mark Zuckerberg invited Ahmed to visit him at Facebook’s headquarters. Officials at NASA have reportedly even offered Ahmed a job (Ahmed was wearing a NASA t-shirt when he was arrested). The growth of the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed has been dramatic.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]The bigger response came from much higher up. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tweeted:Â “We need to be encouraging young engineers, not putting them in handcuffs. #IStandWithAhmed”
Then, almost immediately after Duncan’s tweet, the President weighed in with:Â “Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It’s what makes America great.”
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained further:
Ambition is one of the traits of humanity that differentiates us from animals. More than relying on instinct, we have the ability to push ourselves to do things we don’t necessarily have to do. Ambition, fueled by curiosity and the desire to move forward, is what leads to innovation, progress, and invention. Without ambition, we are no better than sloths sleeping on a tree limb.
The model shown in today’s picture was also a person of considerable ambition. Short of stature, she pushed herself, and her body, to achieve a level of strength and muscle tone that enabled her to perform feats of physical strength not generally attributed to people of her gender or profession. Her ambition led her to excel.
Earlier in his administration, President Obama was quoted as saying:
Regardless of what we want to do with our lives, ambition is required to succeed. When ambition is suppressed, discouraged, and even punitively punished, we destroy that which drives us to become better, that which improves our society, that which moves us forward. We need ambition, not only for ourselves but for others. We should never accept anything less.[/one_half_last]
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