Losing My Ambition

I was at breakfast with a new friend who asked whether I had any “goals.” I couldn’t think of any so I said no. He smiled and said he was in the same situation. We weren’t celebrating being slackers. Instead, we were acknowledging the good fortune of our family backgrounds and our lives.

On the one hand, I like being without goals, without any new grand project pushing me forward. Because at 64, I’m in a “preserve, protect, and defend” mode. And with the notable exceptions of new grandchildren, any big news is likely to be negative. Just like the “news” of the wider world. ¹

On the other hand, I wonder whether trying to keep the status quo and only making small changes around the edges is a game plan for a dull and dreary life. I have the outward frame of activity–– social, physical, and mental–– but inwardly am I rusting?

The world is changed by people pursuing their goals with great ambition. Behind most great feats of the arts or of science or of business is a single-mindedness that is ruthless and relentless.

But single-mindedness is not for me.

Ambitions of my youth

When I was very young, there were moments in my life when I was filled with great confidence, perhaps arrogance, even hubris. I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do or accomplish. I dreamed childishly big. At a minimum, President. Then at age six I found out we’d never had a President who was Jewish and that was unlikely to change.

My substitute dream a few years later was to become rich beyond my wildest dreams of avarice. Rich enough to buy the Frick Museum, around the corner from where I lived. I’d learned that The Frick had once been a private residence, and I dreamed of reclaiming it as my home and one day standing on the front lawn waving through the iron fence at the passers-by.

I took the picture below this week.

Some thirty years later, my firm shared an elevator bank with a Xerox sales and marketing unit. I often saw a white-haired Xerox sales executive, the lines on his face etched deeply. He always looked harried and rumpled, a perpetual cup of coffee in one hand, an invisible cigarette in the other. But he had a certain presence that commanded attention from his Xerox colleagues.

Once, I heard him declare to a younger colleague, “If I have a decent crap in the morning, that’s enough to make my day a success.”

There must be a reason that his comment has stayed with me all these years. It’s not just the ineffable mysteries of our digestive systems. It’s the realization that there are many things that can make us happy. And that much of happiness depends on how reasonable our expectations are.

Multiverses

This past week, my wife and I binge-watched the sci-fi-TV show Dark Matter. We don’t typically like sci-fi that includes multiple worlds because we get confused. But binge-watching helps. So does the pause button to confirm our mutual understanding of what’s going on.

Our son Andrew recommended Dark Matter and called it a love story, which it is. Mild spoiler ahead.

Joel Edgerton as one of the Joels

Joel Edgerton (“Joel-1”) plays a brilliant scientist who 16 years ago sacrificed his career in favor of his pregnant girlfriend, his great love, now his wife. They have a 16-year-old son. Joel-1 has some regrets but he’s mostly happy being a family man.

But there’s another Joel Edgerton (“Joel-2”) in a parallel universe who in a “Sliding Doors” moment chose his career over his pregnant girlfriend. He advised an abortion, they broke up, and then he dedicated his life to the single-minded pursuit of his scientific career.

Joel-2 became wealthy and insufferably arrogant, a “player.” Think of Steve Jobs, but in quantum physics. As the show opens, Joel-2 has been able to perfect the tools necessary to travel among infinite universes, i.e., the multiverse.

Now, 16 years after the two Joels went their separate ways, creating their separate universes, Joel-2 decides that wealth and fame are no longer enough. He wants Joel-1’s family, too. So, he travels to Joel-1’s universe and switches universes with Joel-1 in a violent way.

But having devoted himself to his lab to the exclusion of everything else, Joel-2 has become a world-class dick. He’s identical in many ways with Joel-1, but he’s hopeless at being a good husband to Joel-1’s wife and a good dad to Joel-1’s son. He makes grand, cliched, and suspicious gestures like buying his son a new car or by helicopter-husbanding his wife’s artistic career.

The message is that if you want to go all-in to just one thing, then that one thing is all you get. And if your one thing is the relentless pursuit of work success, you’ll end up a world-class dick.

At one point, I paused the show and told Debbie that of all the infinite universes in the multiverse, I would always choose the universe I had with her. I meant it.

Debbie looked at me with her lovely eyes and said, “What about a different universe where tonight you ordered the right sandwich for me?”

Sandwich-gate happened like this. Debbie wanted a chicken club, my usual. I thought she wanted her go-to, the Greek Salad wrap. I ordered her a chicken and mozzarella sandwich. Why? Because we argued about a side order of bacon. If you want more details, they’re in the footnote. ²

To rust at home or strive with gods

Odysseus, or Ulysses, was not an ideal husband. He left home for twenty years and had long affairs with Circe and Calypso.

Alfred Tennyson imagines a sequel to The Odyssey in his famous poem, “Ulysses.” It’s three years after Ulysses has returned home to Ithaka from ten years of war against Troy followed by another ten years on his boat, battling gods, sirens, and a one-eyed monster (Cyclops, not his penis! Although he did have those two long love affairs).

In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses stews in his old age, impatient, kvetching that he’s stuck as a king ruling over a “savage race” and matched as a husband to an “aged wife.” That wife, Penelope, had been beset by raucous suitors until Ulysses returned home to kill them all.

Tennyson imagines Ulysses still itching to accomplish great feats. His adventures have ruined him for a domestic life. His ambition has not been sated. So he dreams of getting his sailing crew back together to recommence “roaming with a hungry heart.” ³

The poem’s most ringing lines:

“Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.”

Up close to my adolescent gods, the New York Islanders

The closest I ever came to striving with gods was as an 18-year-old in the New York Islanders dressing room. It was May 3rd, 1980, a Saturday afternoon playoff game against the Buffalo Sabres. It was the semi-finals, one step away from the Stanley Cup finals.

I was with my mother, my best friend Steve, and my two younger brothers. We were all Islanders fanatics.

Before the game, my 12-year-old brother Samuel’s braces had sprung a loose wire. The wire was scraping painfully against his inner cheek. Pre-game, Samuel and I approached a security guard who called down to the dressing room. Miraculously, the trainer Ron Waske said bring the kid down and I’ll take care of him. ⁴

Ron Waske went to work adjusting and clipping Samuel’s wire. And there I was in the locker room, in the midst of the Islander players who were like gods to me. I saw my favorite player, my hero Clark Gillies stomping about in his long underwear.

The Islanders won the game, the series, and the Stanley Cup that year. I was there for the final victory. ⁵

Sometimes, especially when we’re young, we can fuse ourselves with the ambitions and exploits of our heroes. I remember times in high school when I was down on myself. But when Clark Gillies had success, I felt it was my success too.

Binary choices

The idea of being president now horrifies me. As for the Frick, I’m happy to visit the museum and remember that Henry Clay Frick only had five short years of residence before his death in 1919. I remain somewhat fused with the ups and downs of the New York Islanders

I prefer to keep the status quo vs. grand ambitions. That preference has been formed by experience, knowledge of my limitations, and my age. I prefer contentment to pushing myself too hard. For example, I may never write a book. When I’ve tried, it’s consumed too much of my attention.

But I’m happy to benefit from the single-minded ambitions of others, whether they’re entrepreneurs or artists. Politics, we’ll leave to the side for now.

Below is a clip of one of my favorite writers, Aaron Sorkin, recreating a brutal argument between Apple co-founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Jobs was a single-minded genius whose products I use and love. He was, however, like Jason-2 in Dark Matter, a world-class dick.

At the end of the clip, Wozniak calls Jobs “an asshole,” and then says, “Your products are better than you.”

Jobs says, “That’s the idea.”

Wozniak says, “It’s not a binary choice. You can be decent and gifted at the same time.”

Question for the comments: Is it a binary choice between being gifted in the Steve Jobs sense and being decent?

1. Also, it’ll be big news when the youngest of our three children gets married. That’s undue pressure to put in the text, but necessary to recognize somewhere.

2. Debbie asked if “it” came with bacon. She meant the chicken club. I thought she meant the Greek Wrap. I said no but I’ll get the bacon for you. She said she didn’t want bacon if it didn’t come with the sandwich. I interpreted that to mean she was denying herself bacon because of the cost ($14 at the most expensive diner in NYC). I told her she should get it if she wanted the bacon. She insisted no. So I canceled the order and then pressed the chicken mozzarella button on Seamless instead of the Greek Salad button. She liked the sandwich she got. But obviously I goofed!

3. Bruce Springsteen’s inspiration?

4. Steve and I knew every player, their jersey number, their backstory, and we certainly knew who Ron Waske the trainer was.

5. I was interviewing for a job a few years later, in 1983, and the interviewer asked me what had been the happiest moment in my life. I said when the Islander won the Cup for the first time in 1980; they won it the next there years also.

The interviewer had an attitude and said “I’m a Rangers fan, what do you think of that?” I shrugged. I didn’t get the offer.