The new government has set out five broadly-based “missions” to help guide it during its time in office. They are nothing if not ambitious: highest sustained growth in the G7, make Britain a green superpower, halve serious violent crime, reform childcare and education, and build an NHS fit for the future. This will be a huge collective effort (if successful): the task of at least ten years in power,
This is the sort of ambition that many could sign up to. It is about the common good, brought about by people working effectively together. It is not one person’s selfish ego trip. It is about making the country a better and more prosperous place.
There are other kinds of ambition, of course. Self-aggrandising. Greed for power or personal riches. The yearning to feel superior to others.
In my new book – “Fair or Foul: the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition” – I explore both kinds of ambition, the good and the bad. There is the positive story, where hard-working and talented people achieve more together. And the darker side, where excess of (misguided) ambition can lead to disaster.
It would be weird to be against ambition. Clearly we need ambitious people to start new businesses, to make technological or medical advances, or find new ways of making life on our planet cleaner and more sustainable.
And yet when we turn on the news or pick up a newspaper (some of us older folk still do this!), we hear and read about other kinds of ambition: the selfish and narrow pursuit of personal glory, or the desire to hold exploitative power over others. I wanted to write a book which takes a look at both sides of this important phenomenon.
So why does the book call itself “the Lady Macbeth Guide to Ambition”? I have to admit that this title has come back to bite its author! The phrase first came into my head as a bit of a joke, and rather amusing I thought it was too.
But as I went back further into the text of Macbeth – a play I first studied 40 years ago – I was reminded that the supposedly cruel and evil Lady M has a bit more sophistication and subtlety to her than she is sometimes given credit for.
When she reads Macbeth’s letter about his encounter with the three “weird sisters” (or witches) who tell him about becoming king, she hesitates, and in his absence addresses some words to him:
“…yet do I fear thy nature –
It is too full o’the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.”
(Act I sc 5)
This is a challenging thought. But is she actually wrong? When we think about the people who achieve the most in highly competitive fields – business, sport, politics – the winners are often driven, almost obsessive about the need to work hard and struggle for success. These are not always the easiest of people to work for or have around! And who is to say that this drive is not, in the most extreme cases, a kind of illness? A healthily balanced life might not include that sort of excessive zeal.
Each chapter of the book begins with a few lines from Shakespeare’s play, introducing a particular theme or aspect of ambition. So the chapters are set out under headings such as Success, Brief, Spur, Enough, Illness, and so on. By the end (a mere 200 pages or so later) I hope the reader will have a richer understanding of the nature of ambition, and will perhaps have been stimulated to think about ambition in a new way.
That’s my ambition anyway! Our new government could do with some focused and targeted ambition also…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fair-Foul-Macbeth-Guide-Ambition/dp/1800183186