Argumentative Essay: The Role of Ambition in "The Tragedy of Macbeth"

Source 2 - Ambition: Do You Need It to Succeed? By Bryan Borzykowski, 6 August 2014

In Japan, if someone is too outwardly ambitious their colleagues won’t work with them.

Mike Coney has been ambitious for as long as he can remember.

When he was young, he would eagerly get up at five in the morning to work on his family’s farm in Lynwood, Washington, in the US. After high school he joined the US Army and took a two-year course on cryptologic warfare where he finished at the top of his class He was quickly promoted through the ranks.

That same drive has helped him climb the corporate ladder. Over the last 30 years, Coney, now 58, has held a number of executive positions at large global firms and in 2009 he landed his first chief executive job with Unitrends, a Burlington Massachusetts-based data protection company.

It’s difficult for Coney to pinpoint exactly what made him such a go-getter. His father showed him what hard work looked like — he was always up early feeding and caring for his horses and maintaining three rental houses that he owned — but Coney thinks there must be something hardwired that has made him always want to strive for more.

“There’s no secret formula or silver bullet,” he said. “It’s something in my DNA.”

The origins of ambition and how it helps people climb to the top, is something people have been wondering about for centuries. There are references to ambition in the Shakespeare’s plays and Greek philosophical texts and even the Bible.

To be sure, unconcealed ambition as a key to business success is typically seen as a Western trait. While it is often applauded in North America, some Asian cultures are quick to stifle any outside appearance of drive. After all, one of the most famous Japanese proverbs is, “the nail that sticks out, gets hammered down”. Ambition, though, is key to success everywhere, albeit in slightly different forms.

Why do some people, like Coney, strive to become the boss of a company, while others seem content to toil away in the same job, perhaps slowly moving up the ladder, for years? The answer, in part, comes down to whether you’re a team player or have an insatiable drive to succeed.

Ambition defined A study by two US university professors tried to define ambition and figure out why some people have it and others don’t. According to the two professors, ambition is mostly about striving for status and achievements, their 2012 study revealed.

“It’s not just about working hard or not working hard,” said John Kammeyer-Mueller, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “It’s about achieving things and the status that goes with reaching those goals.”

Ambitious people don’t necessarily want to become chief executive of a company, he added. Some people simply want to become the best sales person or engineer possible — he calls this cohort “core contributors”. But others, especially on the management side, will want to climb the corporate ladder.

Pushback Many people view ambition as a negative, said Kammeyer-Mueller. Some think that ambitious people are selfish and never satisfied because they always want more.

That perception is similar across cultures, but some countries frown on ambition more than others.

In Japan, for instance, if someone is too outwardly ambitious their colleagues won’t work with them, said Sam Griffiths, managing director of Ambition Group, a Tokyo-based recruitment firm.

That perception could be changing, though. In China, for instance, the government used to provide people jobs for life, but with a more open and rapidly growing economy, people are far freer to jump between jobs and move up the chain.

A 2014 report by MRI China Group, a Beijing-based executive recruitment firm, found that increased compensation and a clear career path are the two main reasons why mainland Chinese workers change jobs.That suggests that ambition is playing a greater role in people’s careers.

“People expect more clarity on their advancement timelines from their current or future employers,” the report said.

Solid self-esteem There are several factors that contribute to ambition, but one big determinant is self-esteem, said Nassir Ghaemi, a professor of psychology and pharmacology at Boston’s Tufts Medical Center.

Research shows that people with high self-esteem are more ambitious than people who have low-self esteem, he said.

Someone who thinks highly of him or herself won’t necessarily rise through the ranks, but “the more self-esteem you have, the more ambitious you are because you think you can do things,” said Ghaemi. “Whether or not you have the specific talents to achieve those things matters less than your idea that you believe you can achieve them.”

Family history is also important, said Kammeyer-Mueller, and it’s something that applies to most cultures. If people have successful parents or grandparents, they’re likely to be ambitious themselves.

For those people, success is simply what’s expected of them.

“Because their parents have succeeded, they also see themselves as being part of a class of people who accomplish a lot in life,” said Kammeyer-Mueller. "They say, ‘that’s expected of me, I’m that kind of person, I’m capable and I should be in a high-status job.’”

In Western nations, personality is another significant factor in ambition, said Kammeyer-Mueller. He found that people with high degrees of conscientiousness, and who are extroverted, are more likely to have that drive to succeed.

Extroverts like when other people acknowledge them and that external approval contributes to their drive, he said. Introverts are less concerned about whether people view them positively, so they don’t need accolades to feel good about themselves.

The extrovert effect doesn’t hold true in all nations, of course. In Japan, for example, employers seek workers who are modest and who can adapt to the culture and norms of the company, said Daniel Dolan, professor of business communication at Waseda University’s Graduate School of Accountancy. How do they try to find that? They look at education — specifically, where a candidate studied.

Companies believe that hiring a sincere and polite graduate of the top universities is a better strategy than hiring a more talented, smart and ambitious graduate of a lower brand university,” said Dolan.

The best kind of ambition? From an organization’s perspective, there are two types of ambition: individual and collective. It’s the latter type that many companies like, regardless of where they are, said Mark Quinn, the London-based leader of talent practice at Mercer, the human resources consulting firm. Businesses want ambitious leaders, but they want that drive to be for the good of the company.

“Ambition is great if it can be channeled appropriately,” he said. “Personal ambition at the expense of either the organization as a whole or of other individuals within the company, is not going to add value to the business.”

David MacDonald, CEO of Softchoice, a Toronto-based business that helps companies with technology, is another ambitious executive, but he never had his sights on the corner office, he said.

He has always wanted to be successful and enjoy the benefits of success, but he’s gotten better and better jobs by being a loyal employee, he said.

“I’ve always focused on the job that I’m in,” he said. “I worked hard and focused on being somebody who was easy to work with and that people could rely on.”

Being an easy-going team player will actually get you farther than ambition, said Ghaemi.

In the corporate world, the people who rise to the top tend to be fairly even-keeled. They have to be likeable, social and hard working, but more importantly, they have to be as normal as possible.

“People who do well are people in the 50th percentile of everything,” said Ghaemi. “They have to be really well liked, but they’re also conformists. They’re not especially creative, they’re not super productive and they’re not especially innovative. They just need to be committed to the institution.”

Although Coney disagrees with Ghaemi — “I tell my team you need to be an outlier,” he said — he does say that he made it to the CEO role more because he did what was asked of him and less because of his own ambition to succeed.

“I didn’t play politics or maneuver my way through an organization,” he said. “I had no inclination to become the CEO of a company. I got to where I am because of my strong sales background and I got on board.”

Source 3 - Why Ambition Could Make You Rich, but Not Happy By Tim Hume, for CNN Updated 5:15 AM ET, Fri March 9, 2012

Admired in some people, reviled in others – there are few character traits as confoundingly double-edged as ambition. Generally accepted as a prerequisite for success, it is nonetheless just as widely viewed as a dirty word. So is it a virtue, or a vice?

According to new research, while ambition can help you achieve a more prestigious education and corporate success, these may not make you any happier in the long run. Less driven "slackers" may be just as happy -- and in fact live longer.

The study was led by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business.

He said social scientists tended to make frequent reference to ambition, without ever really attempting to explain the concept. In response, he had studied data tracking the lives of more than 700 individuals over seven decades, in an attempt to create a better understanding of how ambition shapes our lives.

The results of "On the value of aiming high: The causes and consequences of ambition" surprised him, he said. There was a stronger than expected correlation between ambition, and educational and career success. But those who led successful lives in this regard were not, despite what you might expect, markedly happier or longer lived. And those whose achievements failed to match their ambitions lived less happily, and died earlier.

The takeaway? For one thing, "if you have high aspirations, you better make good on them," said Judge.

The research, to be published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, analyzed data from the Terman Life-Cycle study -- research tracing the lives of hundreds of "high-ability" Americans, starting in 1922 when the subjects were children and following them for up to 70 years.

Some of the participants went on to some of the world's best universities and impressive careers, while other had more modest achievements.

The "ambitious" participants – as judged according to descriptions provided during their youth by the subjects themselves, and their parents -- were clearly more materially successful, attending esteemed universities, working in more prestigious occupations and earning higher salaries.

But despite the fact they seemed to "have it all," said Judge, they were not successful in terms of what might be considered the most important variables: happiness and longevity of life.

"Even though ambitious people ought to have the happiest lives in the world because they attain so much," said Judge, they were only slightly happier than the "slackers," and lived for about the same length of time. That was unless their ambition failed to translate to career success -- in which case they were significantly more likely to die before less ambitious people.

While the study did not look into the reasons for this, Judge believed that, despite their material success, ambitious people were only negligibly happier because they experienced a constant sense of dissatisfaction.

"Ambition by definition causes people to raise their goals and aspirations," he said. "If you have the highest goals in the world you're always going to perceive yourself as falling short. It's like Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill, a thirst that can't be quenched."

One limitation that the study noted was that the research sample consisted only of intelligent individuals, initially raised in California, whose working careers peaked a half century ago. The paper added: "It is difficult to know whether the findings observed here generalize to other samples of individuals."

The study says a lot about the consequences of ambition, but as for the causes? The research suggested it had both "nature" and "nurture" underpinnings. "We found ambition present in kids who were really conscientious and intelligent," said Judge. But it was also prevalent among the children of parents with prestigious occupations.

Knowing, then, that ambition has its drawbacks, and can to an extent be "coached" -- should it be encouraged?

"Yes," says Judge -- with certain caveats. "I don't think we should de-emphasize ambition. It's really important both for individuals, and economies. But we also need to realize the limits we have," he said.

"If we want to instill in our kids ambition, that's all to the good, but we need to realize that's not going to complete their life. It's not going to give them all the skills they need and lead to the outcomes we might care about the most -- which is their happiness, wellbeing and longevity."

The counterbalance to ambition was gratitude for what you have -- a quality which often seemed forgotten by society, said Judge. "That would be the lesson for ambitious people -- remember to stop for a moment, take stock of all that you've accomplished and be happy with that."