TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Mark McGuinness:

If you’re ambitious purely for yourself – for your fame, status, riches, and place in history – then clearly ambition is going to corrupt you. But if you’re ambitious primarily for your work – for how far you can take it, for what you can achieve, for the impact it can have on others – then I believe it’s still possible to think in terms of a noble ambition.

His overall sentiment here is right—that being motivated by substantive work is proper, laudable and good, and that being motivated by fame isn’t—but his distinction is wrong. Mark distinguishes between being motivated by fame and status as being ambitious for yourself, which is wrong, while being motivated by your work is being ambitious for your work, and that’s good.

This distinction is false. If I primarily seek status and fame, then I am not ambitious for myself, because those things inherently require others. To be famous, there must be other people that know who I am; for my status to increase, there must be a group of people to recognize it. Fame and status simply don’t exist without others, which means that, whether you want fame for yourself or not, when you seek it you are primarily concerned with others.

Being motivated by your work, however, is an intensely personal thing. Not many people will slave over a book, making every sentence as crisp and moving as possible, or every character alive, for others. We may claim that we do our work for others, but at some level, it is absolutely false. No one can put that much of themselves into something without being personally motivated by it. They do it because they love doing it, and they have to make it as perfect as they possibly can—because they expect that level of perfection.

This doesn’t mean that people are “selfish”—concerned with benefiting ourselves at the expense of others—it means that they are so passionate about their work, about perfecting it, they can’t stop until they succeed. That’s a wonderful thing, especially because everyone benefits from people like that. We may directly benefit by enjoying the results of their work—Apple’s fine products, for example—or we may benefit in a less quantifiable way: inspiration. Seeing someone who loves what they do so much that they pour themselves into it is so incredibly inspiring to me, because it shows what we are all individually capable of. It shows that, when we stop making excuses for why we can’t do something, and we just do it, we can do a lot of great things.

(Via Ian Hines.)