The Importance of Being Ordinary.
4/27/2025
I'm partly regurgitating things I've heard from Dr. Mike Horton's audiobook, but this has also been related to something I have been thinking upon for a good while now.
We americans have a problem with ambition. Indeed ambition used to be considered a vice in a much older time. Setting goals and having passions wasn't ambition. It wasn't pursuing excellence for the sake of the love of craft and the love of others. But rather it was an even greater, selfish drive towards personal gain.
I've been no less guilty of this vice myself. It's an easy trap to fall into. I think however one thing that has made me less ambitious in recent years is that most of the plans I've had for myself have not panned out the way I wanted them to. In a way, this is probably a great mercy because who knows what could have happened if I were succesful.
This makes me think about the internet and how it has changed over the decades. Ambition has taken over the internet much like it has taken over other areas of life. Is it any wonder that the internet isn't as fun as it used to be? Is it any wonder we are mostly coralled into a handful of small websites, either competing for our 15 minutes of fame, or stuck scrolling our life away?
This makes me also consider my own goals. Not long ago I wished to have a lot of money and maybe a lot of attention. I tried to make that happen then. Now I think it backfired. Not only am I neither rich nor famous, but a bit tired and disillusioned as well.
I think my new goal should be to give up being big, bring the fun back into making things and work diligently on my ideas. I might go unknown. Even be forgotten to time. But at least it will have been time well spent and others might be impacted in a much smaller but meaningul way.