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Carmela Pilande

Ms. Starry

English 9 H

3 April 2017
Ambition Speech

How do we define ambition? What does it mean to be ambitious? If we look at people

considered to be the most ambitious, people like Bill Gates, Walt Disney, Michael Phelps, we can

see that in our world, ambition drives us to succeed, and success is measured by our

achievements. But this raises the question at what cost? To our health, to our morals, to our loved

ones, to ourselves? Ambition can push us up to unimaginable heights, but if left unchecked, like

an unsteady tower, we fall.

In all of the literary works we have read in class, the consistent theme is a warning about

the follies of ambition. Both protagonists, Macbeth and Gene, achieve their greatest dreams and

obtain their worst nightmares. Macbeth rises to the most distinguished position in Scotland as

king but loses, that which should accompany old age, as honor, love, obedience, troops of

friends (Shakespeare 5.3.24-25). The crimes and murders he committed all in the name of his

ambition leads to the loss of everything and everyone he loves including himself. In A Separate

Peace, Gene, in his ambitious quest to be valedictorian and ascend to a position greater than

Phineas, carries out the heinous action of purposefully breaking his best friends leg to ensure his

overall victory. When Phineas dies, Gene reveals that he, could not escape a feeling that this

was my own funeral (Knowles 194). In the name of ambition, by breaking Phineass leg, Gene

ends up losing his best friend and his own identity in the process.

These nonsensical deeds to achieve success dont just happen in fictional worlds but in

reality in places all over our own. Se-Wong Koo, a New York Times journalist, reports that while

South Korean students rank among the top ten in the world in the Program of International
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Student Assessment, 60% of the countrys students confessed to being content in school

compared with an average of 80% among the worlds healthiest nations (Koo). These students

who should be role models and leaders of academic success and educational ambition end up

losing their happiness to attain these positions in the world.

Close by in Europe, ballerinas are considered the absolute pinnacle of beauty and

effortless grace. But backstage, their feet tell a different story about their sacrifices to achieve

their lifelong ambitions of having the pleasure to perform. Peter Norman, a leading podiatrist in

the UK who treats feet, says that he knows, of dancers who have gone on pointe with broken

bones and stress fractures. The pressure on them to get parts, to guard their places in the

companies, means they push themselves too far (John). To risk serious injuries and make the

decision to live with such an enormous amount of pain shows how powerful of a force ambition

is.

Finally, the news organization The Telegraph, reports that Karoshi-the Japanese word

for death from overworking-rose to a record high of 1,456 last financial year (Demetriou)

numbers so high that there are, new laws to force workers to go on holiday (Demitrou).

Imagine what kind of situation you must be in to force the government to have to demand you

into relaxing. Imagine what kind of situation you must be in so that the amount of work you are

doing is actually killing you. In this case, ambition has pushed these workers so far beyond their

breaking point that the only alternative left for their bodies and their minds is death.

These are all people that every single one of us can relate to: ambitious athletes and

students and workers whose number one goal in life is to succeed. So how do we utilize ambition

in such a way that it does not become our fatal flaw? Control. Control. Control. Abigail Adams,

the wife of the second U.S. president, once wrote a letter to her husband saying, How difficult
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the task is to quench the fire and the pride of private ambition and to sacrifice ourselves and all

our hopes and expectations to the public weal! How few have souls capable of so noble an

undertaking. Mrs. Adams never tells her husband to quench ambition but to control the fire and

the pride that accompanies it. Selfish ambition is one of the most crippling traits that we can

possess because it blinds us to everything except our own position in life. All of the real world

examples I talked about are people who allow ambition to grow uninhibited. Instead of

controlling it, ambition ends up controlling them. Self-governed ambition, on the other hand, is

not something to despise but to celebrate. Because by finding the perfect balance between

ambition, our limitations, and everything else important to us, we allow ambition to become the

key to unlocking the best and most balanced person we can possibly be without losing ourselves

in the process.

Works Cited

Demetriou, Danielle. Death From Overworking Claim Hit Record High In Japan. The

Telegraph Online. 04 April 2016. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/04/death-from-

overworking-claims-hit-record-high-in-japan/. Accessed 17 Mar. 2017.

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John, Emma. I Was Doing A Solo And I Heard My Foot Crack. The Guardian. 05 Sept. 2006,

www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/sep/05/dance. Accessed 23 Mar. 2017.

Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2003.

Koo, Se-woong. An Assault Upon Our Children. The New York Times. 01 Aug. 2014.

www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/opinion/sunday/south-koreas-education-system-hurts-

students.html. Accessed 19 Mar. 2017.

Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 16 July 1775 [electronic edition]. Adams Family

Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society.

www.masshist.org/digitaladams. Accessed 2 Apr. 2017.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. The Language of Literature. McDougall Littell. 2002, 327-416.