Ambition: How we manage success and failure throughout our lives (1992) | Hacker News Reader

Ambition: How we manage success and failure throughout our lives (1992)

ambition-book.com

133 pointsmilkshakes31 comments

> When we win, we try for more; when we fail, we cut back.

Thanks for sharing this book, OP. I've personally seen this range of ambition in my own life. I can very much relate to this. When I was younger I was always seeking more out of life. Now becoming an adult and struggling as sole-provider of my family and spending many years attending university while trying to help my wife through severe depression and my special-needs child I am now careful about finding new commitments and I'm trying to greatly simplify my life.

It's an honorable thing you are doing helping your wife out with severe depression. I myself suffer from anxiety disorder and depression and it is difficult to make others understand my plight. The requirements for taking care of a special-needs child are equally challenging I'm sure.

Thanks, I hope you are able to find people who are more understanding. My personal opinion is that people who haven't experienced depression, abuse, or poverty can't understand it. This might just be based on my own experience since I was raised in a family who judges and minimizes those things and I doubt they'll ever change.

I feel there's more to this. I've suffered from chronic depression throughout my entire life. The last bout caused me to quit my job and move back to our family home.

Early in my life when I hadn't experienced failure, I used to aspire a lot and actually did achieve quite a bit despite my shortcomings. Programming whilst depressed isn't an easy task. I've been actively trying to get back into the rat race and trying to pursue something achievable yet worth doing.

So while we cut back, we define our limitations and make further goals achievable (rather than moonshots). I'm not going to be the president or a CEO of a $100BN company anytime soon, but it's not like I couldn't cut it as a dev at a decent company.

In failing we realise our limits and rediscover humility.

> Early in my life when I hadn't experienced failure, I used to aspire a lot and actually did achieve quite a bit despite my shortcomings

I was just like this too. I would have preferred experiencing more failure when I was younger when the risks held less consequences. Now I feel like I never met the expectations of my former self but now my future aspirations are more achievable. Rather than running my own business like I always wanted to do or working for a big-name tech company, I'll be happy when I self-publish the book I'm working on with no expectation of it being successful. I am happy with progress since progress is better than failure and doesn't have the same negative consequences when I don't succeed.

> progress is better than failure and doesn't have the same negative consequences

For sure, we need to keep moving. I like to compare us to sharks, if we stand still we exponentially increase our chances of failing.

I'd love to read that book of yours once it's done. Taking care of the two most important people in your life whilst juggling a career is no easy task.

Looks like a very interesting book, particularly for those of us who are struggling with the fact that we'll never be the success we once thought we would. Thanks!

For everyone else, check out the prologue; it's short and a good read.

Wow, my heart sank when I read this comment.

The frustrating reality of life...

Define success. It's impossible for everyone to be way above average. Is it so bad to be a jack of all trades? A good husband, good father and good community member, instead of world domination of some e-commerce area that would have happened anyway?

I'm not saying give up, I'm just saying if we were all Steve Jobs (not to pick on him I've no idea if he was/was not a "good" person) it would be a mad world.

A dark thought: today we call a jack of all trades unemployed. Illusions of polycompetency are really just multiple specializations when in a business context.

I hope the future generations have an opposite scenario. Where they're told they'll never amount to anything besides being taxpayers, and then they rebel and become the successes they were never meant to be.

Besides your success is entirely how look at it. For me, it's waking up another day to a wonderful family & friends, anything beyond that is a bonus.

Success is as dangerous as failure.

Hope is as hollow as fear.

What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure?

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,

Your position is shaky.

When you stand with your own two feet on the ground,

You will always keep your balance.

-Lao Tzu

It looks like this is a web page that then loads a PDF from https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf -- to what end I'm not sure, though it did screw with my trying to directly save it into a "read offline later" folder.

Wow 224 page PDF insta-loaded into my phone, thanks OP :)

Looks like an online re-edition of a book by the same name, last printed in 2000, author Gilbert Brim.

Without poring through an entire book, what's the reason this was submitted, OP? Presumably you feel it has merit, can you briefly say why?

hi austin, OP here (new acct because i noprocast'd myself but wanted to respond).

this book was written by my grandfather, with his macarthur genius grant, over 20 years ago. he gave copies of it to our whole family for christmas (he had done this once before, 20 years ago, but we were too young for it then).

i have dual motivations here -- i want to share the book with the world, and i also want my grandfather, whose condition is deteriorating, to have a little more joy in his old age. i sent him the google analytics from the site today (he has an HP E-print in his house) and he almost cried. i will likely write more about the process of converting his book, both from a personal and a technical perspective, but i just wanted to get something out there sooner rather than later, and the kindle publishing will take a month or two as the OCR was not so great from the scan so we are retyping the novel.

when i read it, i found the writing to be timeless, and wanted to share it with a larger audience (it was popular in its heyday, and i believe it could be popular now). i am in the process of converting the book to kindle format, which is a nuisance because we have lost the original manuscript. as the first step, i scanned the book (1dollarscan FTW). my grandfather desires the book to reach a wider audience as well, so with his permission, i published the scan.

Thank you for taking the time to bring something worthwhile to a new generation's attention and helping extend the imprint your family leaves on the world.

I don't think there's enough of that in general in this world and it's nice to see someone care enough to do so. I hope someday I have grandchildren that are as caring and considerate.

I'll be sure to check out the book when I get the chance. I hope it reaches many new readers and they can all find something useful for their lives in it.

Excellent, glad you wrote this.

Can I suggest you put something like this on the website front page? It's very engaging, and makes the book far more personal.

I'll be downloading it and reading.

hi syntheticnature,

thank you for taking the time to provide this feedback. i am sorry about the website. frontend is still kind of voodoo to me, even as a software engineer. i wanted my grandfather to be able to see his book on his nurse's ipad. i tried pdf.js but the version i selected seemed to not work with iOS devices for some reason. if you have a better idea for how to deliver the pdf to the ipad, i would welcome any suggestions.

Makes sense. Are there any salient points in the book or passages that you'd like to point out. Having experienced some major success and failures I'd be interested in hearing more.

If the iPad has a Kindle app (& an account), you can mail the PDF to the username@kindle.com and Amazon has the PDF converted and added to the sent account. You can download the title from the cloud to the device by opening the Kindle app.

No need to apologize! I wasn't sure why things were they way they were, but that makes sense to me. In your position I'd be equally clueless as to a better option. Cheers!

> into a "read offline later" folder.

I have a "pretend you will read offline later but never actually read" folder.

Same here, though I find that it still helps a lot with procrastination. Separating the process of discovering content and actually consuming it means I'll only lose 10 minutes instead of getting sucked in for an hour because I'm too afraid to close the tab.

I actually got through a nice chunk of my read offline folder during a long car trip recently, but that only justified this hoarding tendency!

I need to create a cron job to bzip stuff in mine. I need a dropbox for the after life.

Right on. I wish there's internet access in the afterlife.

For those not sure about diving directly into a PDF at work or want to know why they should, here's a review I found online of the book:

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gilbert-brim/ambi...

"Succinct and finely tuned thoughts on why happiness has little to do with money, youth, or even education, by the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Mid-Life Development. Humans make themselves happy, Brim argues, by finding a ``way to live at the level of just manageable difficulty.''"

This looks interesting, but it'll take some time to read through.

He makes an interesting note about robots in the first chapter... which makes me think about the role of 'ambition' in AI. Any writing about that subject out there?

A tangential. Is this book available in mobi format for the kindle?

it will be in 4-6 weeks. email ambitionbookbrim [at] google's free email and i will make sure you get a copy

Any chance for an epub?

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