How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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ambition. As with vanity and egoism, the cult of ambition imposes greater obligations and responsibilities than the normal responsibilities of communal life which the ambitious and the vain seek to avoid. The special difficulties that lie in the wake of ambition deserve further discussion. Nearly every neurotic is an individual whose ambition has been frustrated. This is almost axiomatic. Just because ambition is so generally egoistic in form and meaning, its goal is one of personal superiority which runs counter to the commonweal and the logical laws of common sense. Sooner or later the ambitious individual is forced to admit that he is beaten and frustrated. To save his face he must divert his ambition to the task of being unique in some useless dugout on the battlefront of life, where he can gain pre-eminence at a cheaper rate. He must either retreat, or shift the blame for his failure to some external circum¬ stance over which he seems to have no control. If you pride yourself on your ambition, take a mental inventory of its ends, and ask yourself whether you desire to attain those personal ends and forego the opportunities of being happy, or whether you prefer to be happy, and forego some of the prestige that your unfulfilled inferiority complex seems to demand. If your ambition has the momentum of an express train at full speed ; if you can no longer stop your mad rush for glory, p6wer, or intellectual supremacy, try to divert your energies into socially useful channels before it is too late. Ambition. The history of the world is strewn with the wrecks of egoistic ambitions. Nations have fallen because of their ambitions for aggrandisement. Wars are usually the result of the conflict of two equally vain ambitions. The only normal goal for human ambition is to know more about the world we live in, to understand our neighbours better than we do, to live so that life is richer and fuller because of the quality of our cooperation. All other ambitions end in death, insanity, or the tragic crippling of body and soul.