The Uses of Ambition

Sometimes Misha and I are sitting on the couch with a movie playing, and I am there without really being there. My laptop is open. I am working on an application, this book, or one of the other projects I have convinced myself needs one more thing before I can stop. The movie continues. Misha is beside me. My attention is still inside the work.

Other times we are in bed. I have a laptop desk across me, and she is lying there beside it. There is a woman I love, a machine I enjoy working on, and my attention choosing the machine.

Misha has told me that my head is always in my laptop. She has also said something that reaches further into the life we are trying to build. She has never been afraid that I will be a good father. Her concern is that I may allow my work to consume me and get in the way of being present.

I know she is right.

That admission would be easier if I hated the work. If the laptop represented only drudgery, greed, or someone else's unreasonable demand, then the moral would be obvious: close it and walk away.

But I love what I am doing.

I am working on this book. I am building applications through a company I am creating, Built by Berry. I am experimenting with tools that allow me to attempt things I could not have made alone a few years ago. I do not know whether anyone will ever use some of the applications I have launched. Of course I would like them to become useful and successful. But use is not the only reason I do the work.

I enjoy creation itself. There is a particular satisfaction in beginning with an idea that exists only in my head and watching it become something another person can see, read, or use. A thought becomes a paragraph. An idea becomes a working thing. The process reveals abilities I did not know I had and problems I want to learn how to solve.

That pleasure is one reason the laptop is difficult to close. Another is harder to admit: I need to finish.

I want to prove to myself that I can take an idea all the way to completion. Finishing feels like evidence that the confidence was justified, that the hours were not fantasy, and that I can become the person I hoped I could be when I began.

Some of that proof is directed toward Misha, although she has not asked for it. There have been evenings when we were on the couch and I should have been watching the movie with her. There have been nights when she was beside me in bed and I was still working. Because I have already spent that time, finishing can begin to feel like the way I redeem it. If the project becomes what I hoped, perhaps the time will add up to something worthy of what it cost.

If I stop before the work is complete, the time will feel lost. The trouble is that I do not know what complete means. I have launched some applications and reached milestones, but there is always more that could be done. The ability to imagine an improvement can make stopping feel like a failure of responsibility.

So the work offers its own defense. I enjoy it. It may become useful. I want to finish what I start. I want the time already spent to mean something. None of those reasons is false, and together they can make one more hour appear not merely attractive but necessary.

That is the tension. Ambition can create, serve, rebuild, and enlarge a life. It can also claim the authority to decide for itself how much of that life it may consume.

The question is not whether the work matters.

It is what keeps a good work from becoming the only good allowed to matter.