Personally, I wouldn’t use either word, and this is not just because the word “ambitious” is being used both to encourage and to dismiss one’s aspirations. I would rather say children should be encouraged to have goals in life that serve to realise their creative, physical, mental, etc. potential. Parents should, on the other hand, be able to recognise such potential in their children and help them realise it, help them formulate and achieve their goals. I feel, judging by the use of the word, “ambition” is often linked to politics, and when we say “ambitious” we picture a ruler who drives the entire nations to wars before dying rather disgracefully during the Ides of March. And because we don’t want to end like this, we often use “ambitious” in a negative sense.
However, having a goal in life is crucial, and setting a goal for yourself early in life is twice as important. It is possible to change goals, it is possible to abandon them, but the process of attaining experience and knowledge of achieving the goals takes years, and time is something we haven’t yet learnt to turn back.
The study has shown that children from the middle-class families had higher aspirations and did better than those from the working-class families. This made me remember about my own experience of going to the Moscow State University straight from school in 1997. Before I tell you this story though, I have to say a few words about Soviet/Russian social classes. Unfortunately, I cannot quite draw analogy between the Russian and British types of what is essentially one system. Nowadays, looking at my country since the fall of the Iron Curtain, I realise that we’ve always had classes there. Any attempt by the Communist government to erase the class differences wasn’t really successful. Perhaps, forming groups is proper to a man, and therefore the Soviet society had established its own classes instead of throwing the idea away completely. But when I was at school I was hardly aware of the class differences, to the point that even now I cannot categorise my classmates to suggest their belonging to the Soviet middle-class or Soviet working-class.
So, the story I want to tell is exactly about the importance of setting those high goals and the possibility of achieving them. At school I’d always been an excellent pupil and eventually graduated with distinction and a medal. I don’t remember when and who first suggested that I should go to study at the Lomonosov Moscow State University (MGU/MSU), Russia’s biggest, oldest and one of the world’s most respected universities. Time went by, the “Yulia will go to the MSU” became practically a figure of speech, so often was it used. I, however, began to feel that I did indeed want to go to the MSU, and nothing but the MSU. I wanted excellent education, I was happy to work hard to get it, so the MSU became my choice.
But it was thought to be extremely corrupt; they said it was impossible to enter the MSU without private tuition or public courses; in addition, it was thought to be extremely elitist. My family didn’t have money to bribe anyone, and was quite far from the elite. Finally, after attending a few public lectures I realised it was a loss of time and money (there was a small fee for each lecture), so I just continued to study on my own.
By all accounts, I shouldn’t have succeeded; against the social, financial and other possible odds, I did. When I was already in England, I watched Madonna talking to Michael Parkinson, who asked her how she’d been living in New York, and if she’d ever thought what she would do if she hadn’t succeeded. She said something along the lines of: “This wasn’t an option”. I can inscribe these words on the file in my head that has got the memories of my becoming an MSU student. The MSU was the only uni where I wanted to be. There was absolutely no option for not entering it. I suppose you can say I had considered myself the MSU student long before I got my student card. I wouldn’t call this “ambition”. It was a dream, and I also loved the place where I was going to study, and they say that when you love something with all your heart, you do eventually get rewarded.
And then I found out that those early predictions were indeed a figure of speech for many people. And although I cannot account for any instances of corruption, I have to admit that the MSU is elitist, but then so is Oxbridge. However, I’m sure I’m not the only person whose drive and passion overturned mountains.
Ambition, ambition… Nothing ever can protect anyone from failure, but usually we don’t know we are to fail until we actually do. To be afraid to realise our potential is the biggest disservice we can do ourselves. And why to think of the worst outcome? There’s a saying in Russia: “if you tell someone they’re a pig, they’ll start oinking”. So why not work hard and believe in success instead?
Let’s face it, we keep talking about one’s private goals, whereas the whole mankind should be our example. How on Earth did the Egyptians erect those pyramids? How did Columbus discover America? How did Magellan circumnavigate the Earth? How did we end up flying not only from country to country, but into space? We are people, we cannot fly, and the law of gravitation is against the whole concept of flying. Yet in the 20th c. we’ve finally got wings, figuratively speaking. There is a burning desire, a dream behind each of these achievements to which we should be looking up, without doubt.
Links:
Lucy Ward, When I grow up… the dreams of primary pupils that came true (The Guardian, September 29, 2007).