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Kaori Oliveros

Ms. Starry

English H

21 February 2019

Let's Stay Off the Path of Bad Ambition

Imagine this: you are on a hike. It’s hot. Multiple boulders stand in your way and you

have to find a way around. Thoughts sprint thoughts your head: “I can’t do this. It’s too hard and

too hot.” But what about that feeling; the feeling of accomplishing something you thought you

could never do. It’s the feeling of seeing that mountain top view at the end of the hike. This is

what we call ambition. I believe by keeping our goals to ourselves and using Objectives + Key

Results (OKR), we will accomplish our ambitions and still receive that successful feeling.

Ambition is known as “an enduring paradox” (Samuelson). In Shakespeare’s play,

Macbeth, Macbeth has been given a prophecy that one day he would be the king of Scotland. As

great as that sounds, Macbeth recites that “This supernatural soliciting/ cannot be ill, cannot be

good” (Shakespeare 1.3.130-131). This means that to fulfill the prophecy, he must kill Duncan,

(the ill) and if he does, Macbeth becomes king (the good). After killing Duncan, Macbeth’s

crowned king, but later on ambition gets the best of him. Macbeth’s choice of killing King

Duncan can be described as a dangerous shortcut to the end of the hike. At first we might believe

that the shortcut would be beneficial to achieving our goal, but really it can drastically affect to

us as a human. So, how can we avoid this? How can we avoid the temptation of taking that

shortcut?

As humans, when you accomplish something and think that it’s the greatest thing ever,

your first instinct is to tell your friends, right? Well, this is the worst mistake you could have ever
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made. A ted talk by Derek Sivers called, Keep Your Goals to Yourself, says that talking about

your goals creates a feeling that you are already one step closer to them. This is called “social

reality”. To test this “social reality”, Peter Gollwitzer put 163 people into an experiment, where

they are given 45 minutes to work and were allowed to finish at anytime. Half of the people told

their goals out loud, while the other half kept their mouths shut. Surprisingly, the half of the

people that spoke stopped working at about 33 minutes believing that they were close to their

goal whereas the others work the whole 45 minutes to reach their goal still in belief that there is

much to do. This experiment demonstrates that telling your goals with others will make you less

motivated to achieve them.

The “work” portion of achieving your goals is equivalent to keeping them to yourselves.

We can learn from John Deorr’s Ted talk that using OKRs is the most effective to achieving our

ambitions. OKRs stand for objectives and key results and can be described as “transparent

vessels that are made from the what's and the how's of our ambitions.…. when those

fundamentals are in place they can take you to the mountaintop” (Deorr). The meaning of OKRs

show that they can help us with how we start our ambitions to accomplish them.

In conclusion, the ambitions that we have can be the downfall to our lives and can create

dangerous shortcuts that affect us in the future. So to avoid that we keep our goals to ourselves to

keep us motivated into accomplishing them. Also by using OKRs we can reach the top and know

the what's and the how's of our ambitions. As we use these things, I promise that good, safe

things will affect your life in a way you’ll feel successful in anything you do.

Works Cited

Deorr, John. “Why the Secret to Success is Setting the Right Goals”. Ted.com, April 2018.
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https://www.ted.com/talks

john_doerr_why_the_secret_to_success_is_setting_the_right_goAls. Accessed 24

February 2019.

Samuelson , Robert. “Articles - The Downside of Ambition.” Video | RealClearPolitics,

RealClearPolitics, 17 Oct. 2007,

www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/10/the_downside_of_ambition.html. Accessed

24 February 2019.

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Language of Literature. McDougal Littell,

2002.

Sivers, Derek. “Keep Your Goals to Yourself.” Ted, Ted, July 2010,

www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself. Accessed 24 February

2019.