On Ambition, and "Career"

A memory of a conversation in a biology lab in 1992

Hey guys,

So there’s this memory that keeps coming to mind.

It was back at school, and would have been 1992, when I was sixteen. Right around the time when we had to finalize our choice of three or four subjects, narrowing our study for A-Levels before University. A time that meant starting to focus on the instincts of what our careers might be.

And I remember being in a biology lab, with my best friend Tim. 

A room of dim natural light, brightened with fluorescents, but fine wooden benches and embalmed foetuses of rodents and other small mammals in jars of alcohol on the shelves by the door; a room that was tucked away in the back corner of our main square at school, snuggled in the leafy green hills of Surrey in England.

I remember this moment of conversation, being on a tall wooden stool on which I’d often lean forward with my elbows anchoring me into the wood of the bench. The stool’s two legs that were on the ground would teeter in that way in which male overconfidence tilts and plays with the teeter, half enjoying the risk that the stool will fly from under you.

All kinds of conversations would wheedle out of me and Tim in those days, in our best friendship, these hushed chats of distraction in the middle of different lessons.

But that day it was during a biology experiment. A petri dish and a teat pipette shared between us, the practical experiment time would always become the chance for an impromptu meeting of minds, and addressing grander agendas than whatever was happening in the petri dish.

Like, questioning our belief in God, as I remember one day, asking how could we have such doubts with our zillions of hours sitting there in mass with ‘him’. And like how many children we wanted, and where we might live. And like talking about girlfriends and some fun minutiae of the Saturday night past or the Saturday night to come (the banter with tones of teenage boy pride in having girlfriends, of course).

But the memory that keeps coming to mind lately is the conversation with Tim sharing my thoughts on the concept of career. 

I remember just hating the word itself! And we’d speculate about “career” might mean. What A-Levels we might choose, and what they might mean. And then what that might mean, next. And then what after that, too. We started inventing silly scenarios, and then we’d end up speculating on life when we were fifty. I remember one day we calculated the year in which we’d be fifty, and how weird that the number ‘2025’ sounded, and ‘2026’ for Tim (being a half-year younger), both unimaginable dates back in 1992.  

But the pointy spike of this memory today is remembering specifically two proclamations that came out of me in this conversation on the stools, huddled over a petri dish.

“Mate” I said, locking my eyes onto his with the sincerity of a major announcement…

“I just don’t believe in the word “career”. “What way to live is that?” 

”I see myself living in five to seven-year batches of work indulging in different areas…” 

And then, proclamation number two…

“And I just have one ambition. My ambition is simply to love my work.”

---

And so we sit here on a Wednesday morning in June 2024, thirty two years later, “mid-career”, having ejected myself simply to spaciously take stock.

A beautifully empty calendar, no more travels plotted, no job about to be sought.

Just a bank account heading south, and a memory of a principle. 

And feeling the energy of ambition - and that ambition - as much as ever. I’m glad that I can do this, and still have at least two decades of work ambition ahead to play with, and hopefully three.

Looking back, that fifteen-year-old self was prescient. 

Because like the memory of the conversation, that principle stays threaded through me like a sharp vein of colour in a rock.

Our work takes up the majority of our time awake, for the majority of our lives. 

The nature of our work sparks so much of our stress (when we let it), and germinates so much of our fulfillment (if we let it), and the results of our work creates the majority of the resource we have.

So, then, isn’t doing the right work, and loving our work, the biggest lever we have for leading a truly fulfilling life? 

Everything else in our lives, alongside and downstream of all that time devoted, will take care of itself in the spirit of doing our most fulfilling work.

Last year, the central instinct for me to walk away from the last epoch of ‘career’ was noticing that the belief and the fulfillment wasn’t driving ambition any more. And so it was time for a new seven year batch, but I wasn’t sure in what way, and felt like a break.

Working with energy and natural resources investments was and still is an area of fascination for me. The details and science and investment problems around water and waste projects, and forests and agriculture, land and food, and intriguing new technologies in these areas. 

But with that principle written through every bone in my body, “I have to love my work”, I know that it’s time for the focus of the work to change.

Because I know that I can better return to loving my work, and hopefully getting valuable results for me, for others and for the world, through making a shift.

A shift from working with finding the money for the investments in these areas, to working in an advising and coaching way, with the people in these areas. People obsessed with getting the results they promise. People that are sensitive to the systems and principles that will create the results they want. People that are, or strive to be better leaders in their work, in how they build teams and relationships, and in how they are leaders in themselves.

And so I enjoyed this week stumbling on the proclamation of William James (1842 - 1910), who founded the Department of Psychology at Harvard early in the development of the field, and contributed in particular to the development of understanding between internal states and external behaviors. 

Later in William James’ career, in his late fifties, he wrote in correspondence¹: 

"As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and I am with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man's pride, if you give them time.”

Well, my bed is made too, and learning to better observe these “invisible molecular forces” will be rootlets pulled into the ambition of my work ahead :)

And, in the middle of my career journey, I enjoyed too reading the stark words of English-Irish poet and essayist David Whyte²:

“A true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place.

We find that all along, we had what we needed from the beginning. And, that in the end, we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had undertaken the journey.”

I believe in the law of nature that in the simple ambition of every day loving our work, all other ambitions will come marching along behind.

And I’ll be remembering, as Mum would say - when urging a light touch in getting something done - “let’s not make a career out of it…!”

Postcard from this week’s dawn ride over the bridge and up ‘Hawk Hill’, with fingers of fog pulling in and out of the Bay along the way.

1. I first read a different version of this quotation, most often cited without specific source. According to James K. Stanescu, in his blog The Critical Animal (link), the correct source is William James letter to Mrs. Henry Whitman, June 7, 1899.

2. David Whyte (2001) Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (link). Cited from the essay ‘Ambition’.