6 ms·

Ambition: How we manage success and failure throughout our lives (1992)

133 points by milkshakes 11y ago

syntheticnature 11y ago
It looks like this is a web page that then loads a PDF from https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf -- to what end I'm not sure, though it did screw with my trying to directly save it into a "read offline later" folder.
- austinjp 11y ago
  Wow 224 page PDF insta-loaded into my phone, thanks OP :) Looks like an online re-edition of a book by the same name, last printed in 2000, author Gilbert Brim. Without poring through an entire book, what's the reason this was submitted, OP? Presumably you feel it has merit, can you briefly say why?
  - milkshakes_ 11y ago
    hi austin, OP here (new acct because i noprocast'd myself but wanted to respond). this book was written by my grandfather, with his macarthur genius grant, over 20 years ago. he gave copies of it to our whole family for christmas (he had done this once before, 20 years ago, but we were too young for it then). i have dual motivations here -- i want to share the book with the world, and i also want my grandfather, whose condition is deteriorating, to have a little more joy in his old age. i sent him the google analytics from the site today (he has an HP E-print in his house) and he almost cried. i will likely write more about the process of converting his book, both from a personal and a technical perspective, but i just wanted to get something out there sooner rather than later, and the kindle publishing will take a month or two as the OCR was not so great from the scan so we are retyping the novel. when i read it, i found the writing to be timeless, and wanted to share it with a larger audience (it was popular in its heyday, and i believe it could be popular now). i am in the process of converting the book to kindle format, which is a nuisance because we have lost the original manuscript. as the first step, i scanned the book (1dollarscan FTW). my grandfather desires the book to reach a wider audience as well, so with his permission, i published the scan.
    - cableshaft 11y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to bring something worthwhile to a new generation's attention and helping extend the imprint your family leaves on the world. I don't think there's enough of that in general in this world and it's nice to see someone care enough to do so. I hope someday I have grandchildren that are as caring and considerate. I'll be sure to check out the book when I get the chance. I hope it reaches many new readers and they can all find something useful for their lives in it.
    - austinjp 11y ago
      Excellent, glad you wrote this. Can I suggest you put something like this on the website front page? It's very engaging, and makes the book far more personal. I'll be downloading it and reading.
- milkshakes_ 11y ago
  hi syntheticnature, thank you for taking the time to provide this feedback. i am sorry about the website. frontend is still kind of voodoo to me, even as a software engineer. i wanted my grandfather to be able to see his book on his nurse's ipad. i tried pdf.js but the version i selected seemed to not work with iOS devices for some reason. if you have a better idea for how to deliver the pdf to the ipad, i would welcome any suggestions.
  - code777777 11y ago
    Makes sense. Are there any salient points in the book or passages that you'd like to point out. Having experienced some major success and failures I'd be interested in hearing more.
  - ameen 11y ago
    If the iPad has a Kindle app (& an account), you can mail the PDF to the username@kindle.com and Amazon has the PDF converted and added to the sent account. You can download the title from the cloud to the device by opening the Kindle app.
  - syntheticnature 11y ago
    No need to apologize! I wasn't sure why things were they way they were, but that makes sense to me. In your position I'd be equally clueless as to a better option. Cheers!
- jrcii 11y ago
  > into a "read offline later" folder. I have a "pretend you will read offline later but never actually read" folder.
  - rashkov 11y ago
    Same here, though I find that it still helps a lot with procrastination. Separating the process of discovering content and actually consuming it means I'll only lose 10 minutes instead of getting sucked in for an hour because I'm too afraid to close the tab. I actually got through a nice chunk of my read offline folder during a long car trip recently, but that only justified this hoarding tendency!
  - branchless 11y ago
    I need to create a cron job to bzip stuff in mine. I need a dropbox for the after life.
  - ameen 11y ago
    Right on. I wish there's internet access in the afterlife.
mcguire 11y ago
Looks like a very interesting book, particularly for those of us who are struggling with the fact that we'll never be the success we once thought we would. Thanks! For everyone else, check out the prologue; it's short and a good read.
- mangeletti 11y ago
  Wow, my heart sank when I read this comment. The frustrating reality of life...
  - branchless 11y ago
    Define success. It's impossible for everyone to be way above average. Is it so bad to be a jack of all trades? A good husband, good father and good community member, instead of world domination of some e-commerce area that would have happened anyway? I'm not saying give up, I'm just saying if we were all Steve Jobs (not to pick on him I've no idea if he was/was not a "good" person) it would be a mad world.
    - cryoshon 11y ago
      A dark thought: today we call a jack of all trades unemployed. Illusions of polycompetency are really just multiple specializations when in a business context.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- ameen 11y ago
  I hope the future generations have an opposite scenario. Where they're told they'll never amount to anything besides being taxpayers, and then they rebel and become the successes they were never meant to be. Besides your success is entirely how look at it. For me, it's waking up another day to a wonderful family & friends, anything beyond that is a bonus.
cryoshon 11y ago
This looks interesting, but it'll take some time to read through.
dufalop 11y ago
Putting this on my reading list. Accepting failure has been a major challenge for me but I've come to grips with it enough to understand its really just a stepping-stone toward success.
laotzu 11y ago
Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, Your position is shaky. When you stand with your own two feet on the ground, You will always keep your balance. -Lao Tzu
morbidhawk 11y ago
> When we win, we try for more; when we fail, we cut back. Thanks for sharing this book, OP. I've personally seen this range of ambition in my own life. I can very much relate to this. When I was younger I was always seeking more out of life. Now becoming an adult and struggling as sole-provider of my family and spending many years attending university while trying to help my wife through severe depression and my special-needs child I am now careful about finding new commitments and I'm trying to greatly simplify my life.
- stuxnet79 11y ago
  It's an honorable thing you are doing helping your wife out with severe depression. I myself suffer from anxiety disorder and depression and it is difficult to make others understand my plight. The requirements for taking care of a special-needs child are equally challenging I'm sure.
  - morbidhawk 11y ago
    Thanks, I hope you are able to find people who are more understanding. My personal opinion is that people who haven't experienced depression, abuse, or poverty can't understand it. This might just be based on my own experience since I was raised in a family who judges and minimizes those things and I doubt they'll ever change.
- ameen 11y ago
  I feel there's more to this. I've suffered from chronic depression throughout my entire life. The last bout caused me to quit my job and move back to our family home. Early in my life when I hadn't experienced failure, I used to aspire a lot and actually did achieve quite a bit despite my shortcomings. Programming whilst depressed isn't an easy task. I've been actively trying to get back into the rat race and trying to pursue something achievable yet worth doing. So while we cut back, we define our limitations and make further goals achievable (rather than moonshots). I'm not going to be the president or a CEO of a $100BN company anytime soon, but it's not like I couldn't cut it as a dev at a decent company. In failing we realise our limits and rediscover humility.
mickanio 11y ago
He makes an interesting note about robots in the first chapter... which makes me think about the role of 'ambition' in AI. Any writing about that subject out there?
kamaal 11y ago
A tangential. Is this book available in mobi format for the kindle?
- milkshakes 11y ago
  it will be in 4-6 weeks. email ambitionbookbrim [at] google's free email and i will make sure you get a copy
  - pfista 11y ago
    Any chance for an epub?
inanutshellus 11y ago
For those not sure about diving directly into a PDF at work or want to know why they should, here's a review I found online of the book: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gilbert-brim/ambition/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gilbert-brim/ambi... "Succinct and finely tuned thoughts on why happiness has little to do with money, youth, or even education, by the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Mid-Life Development. Humans make themselves happy, Brim argues, by finding a ``way to live at the level of just manageable difficulty.''"

133 points by milkshakes 11y ago

It looks like this is a web page that then loads a PDF from https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf -- to what end I'm not sure, though it did screw with my trying to directly save it into a "read offline later" folder.

austinjp 11y ago
Wow 224 page PDF insta-loaded into my phone, thanks OP :) Looks like an online re-edition of a book by the same name, last printed in 2000, author Gilbert Brim. Without poring through an entire book, what's the reason this was submitted, OP? Presumably you feel it has merit, can you briefly say why?
- milkshakes_ 11y ago
  hi austin, OP here (new acct because i noprocast'd myself but wanted to respond). this book was written by my grandfather, with his macarthur genius grant, over 20 years ago. he gave copies of it to our whole family for christmas (he had done this once before, 20 years ago, but we were too young for it then). i have dual motivations here -- i want to share the book with the world, and i also want my grandfather, whose condition is deteriorating, to have a little more joy in his old age. i sent him the google analytics from the site today (he has an HP E-print in his house) and he almost cried. i will likely write more about the process of converting his book, both from a personal and a technical perspective, but i just wanted to get something out there sooner rather than later, and the kindle publishing will take a month or two as the OCR was not so great from the scan so we are retyping the novel. when i read it, i found the writing to be timeless, and wanted to share it with a larger audience (it was popular in its heyday, and i believe it could be popular now). i am in the process of converting the book to kindle format, which is a nuisance because we have lost the original manuscript. as the first step, i scanned the book (1dollarscan FTW). my grandfather desires the book to reach a wider audience as well, so with his permission, i published the scan.
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to bring something worthwhile to a new generation's attention and helping extend the imprint your family leaves on the world. I don't think there's enough of that in general in this world and it's nice to see someone care enough to do so. I hope someday I have grandchildren that are as caring and considerate. I'll be sure to check out the book when I get the chance. I hope it reaches many new readers and they can all find something useful for their lives in it.
  - austinjp 11y ago
    Excellent, glad you wrote this. Can I suggest you put something like this on the website front page? It's very engaging, and makes the book far more personal. I'll be downloading it and reading.
milkshakes_ 11y ago
hi syntheticnature, thank you for taking the time to provide this feedback. i am sorry about the website. frontend is still kind of voodoo to me, even as a software engineer. i wanted my grandfather to be able to see his book on his nurse's ipad. i tried pdf.js but the version i selected seemed to not work with iOS devices for some reason. if you have a better idea for how to deliver the pdf to the ipad, i would welcome any suggestions.
- code777777 11y ago
  Makes sense. Are there any salient points in the book or passages that you'd like to point out. Having experienced some major success and failures I'd be interested in hearing more.
- ameen 11y ago
  If the iPad has a Kindle app (& an account), you can mail the PDF to the username@kindle.com and Amazon has the PDF converted and added to the sent account. You can download the title from the cloud to the device by opening the Kindle app.
- syntheticnature 11y ago
  No need to apologize! I wasn't sure why things were they way they were, but that makes sense to me. In your position I'd be equally clueless as to a better option. Cheers!
jrcii 11y ago
> into a "read offline later" folder. I have a "pretend you will read offline later but never actually read" folder.
- rashkov 11y ago
  Same here, though I find that it still helps a lot with procrastination. Separating the process of discovering content and actually consuming it means I'll only lose 10 minutes instead of getting sucked in for an hour because I'm too afraid to close the tab. I actually got through a nice chunk of my read offline folder during a long car trip recently, but that only justified this hoarding tendency!
- branchless 11y ago
  I need to create a cron job to bzip stuff in mine. I need a dropbox for the after life.
- ameen 11y ago
  Right on. I wish there's internet access in the afterlife.

mcguire 11y ago

Looks like a very interesting book, particularly for those of us who are struggling with the fact that we'll never be the success we once thought we would. Thanks! For everyone else, check out the prologue; it's short and a good read.

mangeletti 11y ago
Wow, my heart sank when I read this comment. The frustrating reality of life...
- branchless 11y ago
  Define success. It's impossible for everyone to be way above average. Is it so bad to be a jack of all trades? A good husband, good father and good community member, instead of world domination of some e-commerce area that would have happened anyway? I'm not saying give up, I'm just saying if we were all Steve Jobs (not to pick on him I've no idea if he was/was not a "good" person) it would be a mad world.
  - cryoshon 11y ago
    A dark thought: today we call a jack of all trades unemployed. Illusions of polycompetency are really just multiple specializations when in a business context.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
ameen 11y ago
I hope the future generations have an opposite scenario. Where they're told they'll never amount to anything besides being taxpayers, and then they rebel and become the successes they were never meant to be. Besides your success is entirely how look at it. For me, it's waking up another day to a wonderful family & friends, anything beyond that is a bonus.

cryoshon 11y ago

This looks interesting, but it'll take some time to read through.

dufalop 11y ago

Putting this on my reading list. Accepting failure has been a major challenge for me but I've come to grips with it enough to understand its really just a stepping-stone toward success.

laotzu 11y ago

Success is as dangerous as failure. Hope is as hollow as fear. What does it mean that success is a dangerous as failure? Whether you go up the ladder or down it, Your position is shaky. When you stand with your own two feet on the ground, You will always keep your balance. -Lao Tzu

morbidhawk 11y ago

> When we win, we try for more; when we fail, we cut back. Thanks for sharing this book, OP. I've personally seen this range of ambition in my own life. I can very much relate to this. When I was younger I was always seeking more out of life. Now becoming an adult and struggling as sole-provider of my family and spending many years attending university while trying to help my wife through severe depression and my special-needs child I am now careful about finding new commitments and I'm trying to greatly simplify my life.

stuxnet79 11y ago
It's an honorable thing you are doing helping your wife out with severe depression. I myself suffer from anxiety disorder and depression and it is difficult to make others understand my plight. The requirements for taking care of a special-needs child are equally challenging I'm sure.
- morbidhawk 11y ago
  Thanks, I hope you are able to find people who are more understanding. My personal opinion is that people who haven't experienced depression, abuse, or poverty can't understand it. This might just be based on my own experience since I was raised in a family who judges and minimizes those things and I doubt they'll ever change.
ameen 11y ago
I feel there's more to this. I've suffered from chronic depression throughout my entire life. The last bout caused me to quit my job and move back to our family home. Early in my life when I hadn't experienced failure, I used to aspire a lot and actually did achieve quite a bit despite my shortcomings. Programming whilst depressed isn't an easy task. I've been actively trying to get back into the rat race and trying to pursue something achievable yet worth doing. So while we cut back, we define our limitations and make further goals achievable (rather than moonshots). I'm not going to be the president or a CEO of a $100BN company anytime soon, but it's not like I couldn't cut it as a dev at a decent company. In failing we realise our limits and rediscover humility.

mickanio 11y ago

He makes an interesting note about robots in the first chapter... which makes me think about the role of 'ambition' in AI. Any writing about that subject out there?

kamaal 11y ago

A tangential. Is this book available in mobi format for the kindle?

milkshakes 11y ago
it will be in 4-6 weeks. email ambitionbookbrim [at] google's free email and i will make sure you get a copy
- pfista 11y ago
  Any chance for an epub?

inanutshellus 11y ago

For those not sure about diving directly into a PDF at work or want to know why they should, here's a review I found online of the book: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gilbert-brim/ambition/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gilbert-brim/ambi... "Succinct and finely tuned thoughts on why happiness has little to do with money, youth, or even education, by the director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Mid-Life Development. Humans make themselves happy, Brim argues, by finding a ``way to live at the level of just manageable difficulty.''"