Your personal ambition: locked up or wide open?

Your personal ambition: locked up or wide open?

By Jon Rappoport
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For centuries, the word “ambition” has been injected and stained with negative connotations: greed, selfishness, lowness of character.

These days, it’s because the current fashion (backed up by enormous propaganda) is: “give everything away for free to everybody else.”

Of course, no one actually does that. But it doesn’t stop people from espousing the idea. It plays well. It’s a badge of honor. The implication is: no matter who they are, no matter what they ask for, other people are more important than Self.

Where does this the leave the individual?

He’s the exception to the rule. If he’s sitting with the wrong people and somehow, accidentally, transmits the impression that he’s happy to be succeeding at doing what he really wants to do, there could be blowback.

He’s “ambitious.”

He wants to “achieve something on his own.”

He must be from another planet.

The rule is: everything must be done out of a sense of Giving Service. As in a bland and pallid church. Bring out the hymnals.

If “success” is mentioned at all, it should be couched in “spiritual” terms. Devotion to all of humanity all the time. Saving the entire planet, at a bare minimum. And before breakfast, if possible.

We hear, “I’m blessed to be doing (fill in the blank). Really? Who provided the blessing? Was there a ceremony? Wine? Crackers?

“I’m giving back.” Back? Say again? Did you just get back from somewhere? A conference in a higher realm, where you were tasked to perform great actions here, minus any shred of self-interest?

Ambition? At best, a useless appendage from a bygone age, when people were self-absorbed and confused, when they, as individuals, were deluded into thinking they were building something on their own.

Didn’t you get the memo? We’re all in this together. And don’t commit the faux pas of asking who the “we” is and what the “this” is and how “all together” actually works.

Ambition? “The Universe” must place it in a very low position on the scale of righteousness.

A private client of mine once completely broke up during one of our conversations. When he stopped laughing and calmed down, he told me he realized how he’d been keeping himself in check because, whenever he tried to think about his personal ambitions, he was blocked. He wasn’t supposed to be ambitious. He wasn’t supposed to think about his future in terms of his own ambition. He wasn’t supposed to be who he was. He wasn’t supposed to pour all his energy into making his own desires come true. That was treasonous. That was betraying “everybody else.” That was…

Blasphemy.

But he’d suddenly recovered from the prison sentence. He’d come back. He’d broken out of the chains. He’d started breathing again.

No, this wasn’t a greedy man who then connived ways to dupe others for his own gain. This wasn’t a criminal who then began to plan cons and scams. This wasn’t a tyrant coming out of his cave.

This was a very creative man who could suddenly see a new future stirring; a future that would get him out of bed in the morning with energy and excitement.

A problem?

No. Not at all.

He was on his way.

I’ve had clients who authentically decided they wanted to form groups to forward crucial causes. THAT was their ambition.

Over and over in my consulting practice, it’s been driven home to me that the individual makes these discoveries and decisions for himself—and when he does, he has the energy to launch.

“I should do this” and “I’m best fitted to do this” don’t hold a candle to “I WANT TO do this,” when the want is deep.

Ambition and Want are actually close cousins, when you sweep away the social debris and the propaganda.

I have a bias in favor of the individual. I always have. When all is said and done, the individual is the root. Yes, there is a thing called team or group or organization, but today’s culture has vastly overvalued “cooperative enterprise,” at the expense of the creative person.

That person understands something which evades the prescriptions of the culture. He knows he is operating at a different level. He feels, glimpses, senses a power that doesn’t belong to the group. It never has, and it never will.

This fact is a cause for celebration, even if most people don’t grasp the importance of it or recognize that, in numerous ways, they are benefiting from the creative output of individuals who don’t give up, who launch enterprises that travel far beyond conventional boundaries.

Here is a famous quote attributed to Victor Hugo: “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.”

That formulation is weak and passive. I would say: Nothing is stronger than the creative individual who launches a new idea, gives it shape, and makes it fact in the world.

There are many more such individuals than we would suspect. They are standing in the shadows, wondering whether they should give expression to their ambitions.

The answer is yes.

Filed under: Uncategorized Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years. http://nomorefakenews.com/