Brian Tracy presents a short talk defining ambition as a universal human characteristic: given choices, people choose actions they believe will leave them better off. He argues ambition is neutral—it can be positive when it drives self-improvement and service to others, or negative when it leads to harming or exploiting others.
When you study human behavior, you hear people say, well, that's just human nature. That's just the way people are. So for 30 years I studied this. How are people? And what we found is that exhaustive research has been done and we have found that human beings, being human beings, have certain fundamental characteristics. And everybody has them all over the world, from infancy until death. And the one I want to talk to you about today is. We say that people are ambitious. If you're confronted with a choice of two actions, you will always choose the action that you feel will leave you better off rather than the other. You will always choose more improvement to less improvement. This means that everyone is ambitious. Ambition itself is neutral. It's only in the way ambition is manifested that makes it either positive or negative. The good side of ambition is when your ambition drives you to become a better person, do a better job, or work harder, stay later and contribute more. When ambition is manifested this way, it serves your life. It guarantees your present and opens doors for your future. All successful people are ambitious. Your life only gets better when you do. Now let's talk about the dark side of ambition. When your ambition drives you to engage in activities that are harmful to others, such as lying, cheating, deceiving, defrauding, taking advantage of others, this form of ambition is destructive and negative. When manifested in a positive way, ambition is used to serve and help others. When manifested in a negative way, ambition is used to use and abuse people for short term personal benefit. But ambition by itself is neutral. It's neither good nor bad. It's only the way that you apply it in your life that gives it any kind of a value judgment.
