Ambition

Defined as “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work”.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Captain of the football team? Head cheerleader? Valedictorian? Teacher-of-the-year? Winner of the Daytona 500? Olympic gold metal winner? Nobel Peace Price winner? Rock star? Rich and Famous?

Some have more reasonable ambitions.

Get gainful employment? Purchase a car? Get credit and a mortgage on a house? Marry and raise a family? Get a pet?

All good intentions, but the basic ambitions remain.

Find love? Stay healthy? Eat right? Exercise?

But most of us have simple ambitions.

Get the furniture off the front lawn? Explain to the officer what that cigarette is in your car’s ashtray? Tell your kids why you are leaving? Hope the check clears? Hide the body? Tell him it’s not his baby?

What was my ambition?

I was never ambitious. I didn’t want to be the star quarterback or King of the prom. I had no skills or talent to reach for the stars, so I just bumbled into jobs that were easy to do, the same method with life. Like any horny teenager I had the ambition of having a steady girlfriend but never found one. Had to get married to have a steady, but that didn’t meet my ambitions either. I had no ambition to make a lot of money, but enough to get by and that was good enough. I never had an ambition to become famous except that time after Brian Jones died and I thought I could fill in but Mick Taylor got the job because he was English. I had no ambition to be liked but was courteous to others and found more love than most people could handle.

So toward the end of the game, it was more luck than ambition. Remember the definition requires “determination and hard work” and I don’t do that.