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Ambition It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society, holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadayswith birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having childrenis nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally,though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times,increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futuritya sense of building for tomorroware inextricable.Working, saving, planningthese, the daily aspects of ambitionhave always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of societys work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition. It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world:without demands, without abrasions,without disappointments. People would have time for reflection.Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity.Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.Ah, how unbearably boring life would be! Its Never Too Late to ChangeAge is no criterion when it comes to changing your life. In fact, it might be just the opposite. The older we get, the more we must change.Change is what keeps us fresh and innovative. Change is what keeps us from getting stale and stuck in a rut. Change is what keeps us young. This is not easy.When we are young its easy to change and experiment with different things. The older we get the more set in our ways we become. Weve found out what our comfort level is, and we all want to stay in it. We dont want to be risk takers anymore, because risk frightens us, and simply not changing seems so easy.We must fight through this. We must look fear straight in the eye and take it on. We must tell ourselves that we have too much talent, too much wisdom, too much value not to change. I believe that Jim, who is on my staff, is one of the best assistant coaches in the country. But I almost didnt hire him three years ago because I thought that psychologically he was too old, that he had lost the drive and passion that an assistant coach needs. Three years ago he was forty, and I thought he might have spent too many Saturday afternoons at the country club, that he wasnt going to get in the trenches anymore, like the younger assistant coaches do. But Jim told me that he couldnt wait to get down in the trenches again. So I hired him, and hes been an integral part of our success. There is a conventional wisdom in coaching that once youve been a head coach you cant enthusiastically go back to being an assistant again and still have the same passion as before. Jim didnt buy into that. He didnt let his old age get in his way. He was ready when opportunity came calling. He reestablished a work ethic second to none with the eagerness of a person right out of college. And Im thankful for what he did, because he played such an essential role in our championship season.This is what we all must do. We must realize that its never too late to begin making changes that can transform our life. Failure Is a Good Thing Last week, my granddaughter started kindergarten, and I wished her success. I was lying. What I actually wish for her is failure. I believe in the power of failure.Success is boring. Success is proving that you can do something that you already know you can do, or doing something correctly the first time, which can often be a problematic victory. First-time success is usually a fluke. First-time failure, by contrast, is expected; it is the natural order of things. Failure is how we learn. I have been told of an African phrase describing a good cook as she who has broken many pots. If youve spent enough time in the kitchen to have broken a lot of pots, probably you know a lot about cooking. I once had a dinner with a group of chefs, and they spent time comparing knife wounds and burn scars. They knew how much credibility their failures gave them. I earn my living by writing a daily newspaper column. Each week I am aware that one column is going to be the worst column. I dont set out to write it; I try my best every day. I have learned to cherish that column. A successful column usually means that I am treading on familiar ground, going with the tricks that work or dressing up popular sentiments in fancy words. Often in my inferior columns, I am trying to pull off something Ive never done before, something Im not even sure can be done. My younger daughter is a trapeze artist. She spent three years putting together an act. She did it successfully for years. There was no reason for her to change the act- but she did anyway. She said she was no longer learning anything new and she was bored. So she changed the act. She risked failure and profound public embarrassment in order to feed her soul. My granddaughter is a perfectionist. She will feel her failures, and I will want to comfort her. But I will also, I hope, remind her of what she learned, and how she can do whatever it is better next time. I hope I can tell her, though, that its not the end of the world. Indeed, with luck, it is the beginning. The Folly of AnxietyHalf the people on our streets look as though life was a sorry business. It is hard to find a happy looking man or woman. Worry is the cause of their woebegone appearance. Worry makes the wrinkles; worry cuts the deep, down-glancing lines on the face; worry is the worst disease of our modern times.Care is contagious; it is hard work being cheerful at a funeral, and it is a good deal harder to keep the frown from your face when you are in the throng of the worry worn ones. Yet, we have no right to be dispensers of gloom; no matter how heavy our loads may seem to be we have no right to throw their burden on others nor even to cast the shadow of them on other hearts.Anxiety is instability. Fret steals away force. He who dreads tomorrow trembles today. Worry is weakness. The successful men may be always wide-awake, but they never worry. Fret and fear are like fine sand, thrown into lifes delicate mechanism; they cause more than half the friction; they steal half the power. Cheer is strength. Nothing is so well done as that which is done heartily, and nothing is so heartily done as that which is done happily. Be happy, is an injunction not impossible of fulfillment. Pleasure may be an accident; but happiness comes in definite ways. It is the casting out of our foolish fears that we may have room for a few of our common joys. It is the telling our worries to wait until we get through appreciating our blessings. Take a deep breath, raise your chest, lift your eyes from the ground, look up and think how many things you have for which to be grateful, and you will find a smile growing where one may long have been unknown.Take the right kind of thoughtfor to take no thought would be sinbut take the calm, unanxious thought of your business, your duties, your difficulties, your disappointments and all the things that once have caused you fear, and you will find yourself laughing at most of them. The Road to HappinessIf you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, you will see that they all have certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into existence. Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty. The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too solemnly.It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion. Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may need a better theory to help them to recovery, just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really matter. If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his childrens noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimena different diet, or more exercise, or what not.Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it. Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy. Wake up Your LifeYears ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise ad