Hope revives within me. I shall recover, and my dream of glory be fulfilled. Nelson will yet be an admiral.
-Horatio Nelson
Targeted ambition.
From:
Sugden, John. Nelson: A Dream of Glory, 1758-1797. United States, Henry Holt and Company, 2004.
Tag: ambition
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Johnson learned wherever he went. On a visit to an army camp in 1778, when he was nearly sixty, he enquired about many aspects of military practice, including the weight of musket balls, and the range at which they could be effective. He displayed a good knowledge of gunpowder, talked on a range of military topics, and sat up late watching a court martial. The inventor Richard Arkwright said Johnson was the only person who, on first view, ‘understood the principal and powers of his most complicated piece of machinery’. He had been advised by his cousin Cornelius Ford, with whom he spent some formative months as a young man, ‘to obtain some general principles of every science’.
– Henry Oliver
Similar to Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson was a man interested in everything.
Second time through on the Samuel Johnson chapter…
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg181, Kindle edition.
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Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue will be ll that we can recollect with pleasure’.
– Henry Oliver
It’s Monday.
Resolve. Work. Fail. Resolve again.
The Samuel Johnson chapter continues to inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
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He once picked up a destitute prostitute in the street and carried her on his back to his house where she stayed for some weeks to recover her health. He loved few things better than a tavern. ‘It is wonderful, Sir, what is to be found in London,’ he told Boswell, ‘the most literary conversation that I have ever enjoyed, was at the table of Jack Ellis, a money scrivener behind the Royal Exchange.’ ‘A great city,’ he believed, was ‘the school for studying life’. It was by studying life, as much as from his scholarly reading, that Johnson became the writer he did.
– Henry Oliver
Henry Oliver’s book is brilliant. Carrying it with me everywhere. Burning through pages.
The Samuel Johnson chapter inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
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Maxi Gorynski makes the argument that the high literacy from earlier times encouraged ambition
John Donne was not known for his intolerable sexiness but for being such a hellcat meme-minter at the pulpit.
The above, may be the best “on-line” sentence I’ve read.
When Hugo wandered off into thick tangential considerations of niche subjects like Gothic architecture, the public didn’t scrunch its nose and go and read something simpler or more focused; instead, they took his lead and developed a passion for Gothic architecture themselves.
Interesting how the French didn’t want to simplify Hugo’s work, but instead further develop their understanding of Gothic architecture.
How was the passion for Gothic Architecture demonstrated at that time?
In summary, what a lack of ambient access to high literacy has to do with ambition: Provides people fewer tools for the processing and composition of complex thought, and fails to keep the mind adequately nourished with new impressions and syntheses that are conducive to high-ambition; and because works of high literacy are themselves conceived in ambition, the lack of opportunity to be regularly immersed in them deprives one of a sense of everyday communion with what is excellent.
I appreciate Maxi Gorynski‘s essay format. Each section presents a clear summary to solidify the point.
Read his essay On a Lack of Ambition full here.
Floodlights and Goalposts 