Right and Wrong Ambitions // Essential Life Skills, Part 2
So let me ask you, is ambition right, or wrong? I mean is it okay to be ambitious, or, if you believe in Jesus, is ambition something that you need to give up? As things turn out, it’s not ambition itself that’s the problem, it’s the sort of ambition, the type of ambition that you have in your heart, that brings you unstuck. Dealing with Ambition So let me ask you, is it right to be ambitious? My dictionary tells me that ambition is a strong desire to do or to achieve something. A desire, a determination to achieve success. As someone who believes in Jesus, I’ve often struggled with this one, because success, well that can be truly self-seeking, self-fulfilling. Jesus, after all, said this – Luke chapter 9, verse 23: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. I don’t know, but that radical view – and it is a radical view – of what it means to believe in Jesus, to live your life for Jesus, well, it doesn’t seem to fit too well with this notion of success. And frankly, I’ve lived my life, at least the first thirty-six years of it, often with the wrong sort of ambition in my heart. Here’s what it looks like, this wrong ambition. You want to make a splash, you want to be noticed, you want other people to think well of you. You want, you want, you want … to be successful. Yeah, there’s money involved. Hey, who doesn’t want to have money? Who doesn’t want to live in a nice big house and drive the sort of car that other people will notice? Who doesn’t want to be able to afford the sort of clothes that’ll make them look sharp and catch people’s eyes? That’s precisely how the thinking goes. And so what you do, what I did, is you climb over the top of other people, you walk over them, crash through them, even destroy them to get to your success. That’s what wrong ambition looks like. I ought to know. When I was in business, I was known to make grown men cry. I wanted to win. I wanted to succeed. How about you? Does any of that sound even vaguely familiar? And I can tell you, sadly, you see that sort of behaviour even amongst people who profess to believe in Jesus. Jesus saw it too and this is what He had to say about this wrong kind of ambition. John chapter 5, verse 44: How can you believe when you accept glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the one who alone is God? That’s the bottom line isn’t it? How can we possibly believe in Jesus, how can we possibly follow Him and serve Him and love Him with all that we are, when we’re seeking glory for ourselves? And that’s what many people do. We want to put our best foot forward. We want other people to think well of us, to admire us. And when you do that, when you seek glory for yourself, it becomes virtually impossible to believe in Jesus. That sort of ambition, well, it’s simply not God’s plan for your life. But there is an ambition, a zeal that God does want you to have. Jim Collins is a man who, with a research team that he established, set out to determine what it is that sets the great companies apart from the ordinary ones. What are the common threads, the common attributes that run through truly great companies, when compared to the also rans? That was the question. So, he chose a number of stellar performers on the New York stock exchange, and set about doing the research to get answers to those questions. What he discovered, not surprisingly, is that one of the things that set the great companies apart was great leadership. And one of the essential leadership attributes that he writes about in his book, "Good to Great" is this: Great leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitions, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not for themselves. I’ve thought about that … a lot. And the conclusion I’ve come to is that Collins’ research simply bears
