goals on Ambition

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

In a survey given in 1976, participants were asked to list their life goals. Fame ranked fifteenth out of sixteen. In a recent survey, 51 percent of millenials listed being famous as “one of their top...

In Part 1 of this series ( Climbing the Pastor's Ladder: Holy Ambition and Escaping the Comparison Trap ), we looked at the ladder of pastoral advancement and the trap of comparing ourselves t...

What do you want to achieve? Greater riches? Cheaper chicken? A happier life, a longer life? Is it power over your neighbors that you are after? Are you only running away from your death? Or are you s...

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.

The pressure to succeed is greater than it has ever been—People feel that they must pursue that goal been…people feel that they must pursue that goal even if it means crawling over the bodies of cowor...

Do not think or do anything without having some aim in sight; the person who journeys aimlessly will have labored in vain.

Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...

It all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.

Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining driven, we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth. If at present ...

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Direction, not intention determines your destination.

Without exception … all try their hardest to reach the same goal, that is, joy.

None climbs so high as he who knows not whither he is going.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

By reaching for what appears to be impossible, we often actually do the impossible; and even when we don’t quite make it, we inevitably wind up doing much better than we would have done.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant g...

Goals that people set for themselves and that are devoted to attaining mastery are usually healthy. But goals imposed by others—sales targets, quarterly returns, standardized test scores, and so on—ca...

True friends face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.

I have come to see clearly that life is more than self. It is more than doing what I want, striving for what will benefit me, dreaming of all I can be. Life is all about my relationship with God. Ther...

Goals can be energizing—when you win. But a vision is more powerful than a goal. A vision is enlivening, it’s spirit-giving, it’s the guiding force behind all great human endeavors. Vision is about sh...

God's ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development. He wants you to grow up spiritually and become like Christ.

I recently heard a story about a race in which one runner had a significant lead over the rest of the field. As the man rounded the final turn, the crowd roared as he inched closer and closer to the f...

Pragmatism may be defined simply as the approach to reality that defines truth as “that which works.” The pragmatist is concerned about results, and the results determine the truth. The problem with t...

The goal of our convictions is to guide our own conduct so that it is pleasing to Jesus, not to guide the conduct of others.

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...

A documentary about Ernest Shackleton’s early twentieth-century exposition to the South Pole shows the classified ad Shackleton put in a London newspaper: Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wa...

Are the things you are living for worth Christ dying for?

Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.

Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.