Ego Trip or Ambition

Inspired by a post by Dame Catherine Wybourne on her blog here I wrote this response to her, than thought it deserved it's own airing.

I suspect that within each of us is the seed of wanting to ‘get on in life’, most certainly when I was younger I wanted to progress in my career. In those days, it was because the Army is a very competitive environment and your progress up the ranks meant the better provision for your family and membership of the elitist Warrant Officer and Sergeants Mess or even the Officers Mess if you were successful enough to earn a Commission. It was also the key to a higher pension and probably not having to work that hard following retirement.

There was such a thing as ‘Rank’ or ‘Position’ envy where some people resented the progress of others, thinking that they didn’t deserve to hold the rank or position that they had achieved. In an environment when the concentration was entirely on team cohesion and effective working as a disciplined fighting force, such dissension was quickly dealt with and those people weeded out or given a role elsewhere to avoid the problems that could arise in a situation where unit cohesion and discipline were key to the success of the unit on operations or training.

In the end, you tire of the relentless pressure to succeed and normally find a niche in which you are comfortable – but the system isn’t content with that. If your lack of ambition is discerned you receive poor performance reports, which can easily lead to negative consequences for your future employment. A for instance would be having to achieve a certain rank by a given year of service or you could be discharged under rules designed to protect the pyramid and maintaining the fitness of the fighting element of the Army or unit.

I eventually reached a point, where I was told that no further progress was possible (brutal honesty) and I looked around for other employment. Strangely enough, I found it in similar employment in one steady rank, with the reserve forces, which held the prospect of continuing employment in one role, in one place and the opportunity to settle down. I grabbed it eagerly. Of course that wasn’t the end of the story, as eventually someone decided that commissioning me and sending me to another job was a good idea, which meant staying put in the same home, and four years later a promotion took me to another post, where I served until my retirement in 2009.

The moral (perhaps) of this story is that ambition can be useful, but it’s also destructive to life and personal relationships, certainly in a highly competitive working environment. If you’re always looking five or 10 years ahead to see where you might be, and at the same time, looking over your shoulder to see who is coming up faster than you and might superced you in time. Such an aggressive approach to life is wearing as I have said, and set backs and disappointments can sour relationships and make you bitter.

But along the way, you learn an enormous amount about yourself and about others. You have choices to make when you lead people. You can nurture and encourage them, and lead them by example, or under the guise of discipline, attempt to drag them in your wake. I met many of both types of leader in my 43 years in the service, and I know that I strove to be the nurturing, encourager, rather than the disciplinarian. You certainly needed discipline, but the key to any organisation is the self discipline and feeling of self-worth of each member. Feeling that they are valued and respected and led by people with integrity and a solid sense of humour.

I do know that I learned that respect for others and having a high sense of integrity was essential to being the type of leader that was needed. And, when eventually I came back to faith, the groundwork was already there for me to move forward and to grow as a Christian.

Do I regret having ambition to succeed. To some extent yes, but without it, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today.