The Passion for Accomplishment

Note: The following is an excerpt from Orison Swett Marden’s Be Good to Yourself, published in 1910. Whereas ceaseless striving is often framed through an antiseptic neurochemical lens — as merely a fruitless, desultory, dopamine-driven chase —or as an ethically questionable, if not outright malevolent, thirst for money and power, Marden’s framing of ambition is highly refreshing. (Note that in Marden’s day, a “competence” described having modest financial security — a sufficient amount of money to live on comfortably, without needing to work.)

“What are the motives that keep men slaving after they have acquired a competence?” “Is ambition a selfish attribute?” These and similar questions are very frequently asked. 

The passion for conquest, for power, the love of achievement, is one of the most dominant and persistent characteristics of human nature. With most men the bread-and-butter and housing problem, the question of getting a living, a competence, is only one, and often one of the least, of the motives for an active career.

We have an instinctive feeling that we have been set in motion by a Higher Power; that there is an invisible spring within us—the “imperious must “—which impels us to weave the pattern given us in the Mount of Transfiguration of our highest moment, to make our life-vision real. A divine impulse constantly urges us to reach our highest ideal. There is something back of our supreme ambition deeper than a mere personal gratification. There is a vital connection between it and the great plan of creation, the progress, the final goal, of the human race.

Even if dimly, we are conscious that we owe something to the world, and that it is our duty to pay the debt. There is something within which protests against our living idle, purposeless lives; which tells us that our debt to the human race is a personal one. It tells us that our message to humanity is not transferable; that we must deliver it ourselves. No matter how much money we may have, we don’t feel quite right unless we are doing our part of the world’s work. We feel that it is mean, contemptible, to be drones in the great human hive; to eat, drink, wear, and use what others earn by hard labor. We have a sneaking feeling that we are criminals; that it is unworthy of us to shirk a manly or womanly part in life; it violates our sense of justice, of fairness.

These promptings of humanity and the yearning of every normal man and woman for a fuller, completer life; the craving for expansion, for growth; the desire to objectify our life-visions, to give birth to the children of our brain, to exercise our inventiveness, our ingenuity, to express our artistic temperament, our talents, whatever they may be; the inherent, instinctive longing to become that which we were intended to be; to weave the life-pattern given us at birth—these are the impelling motives for a creative career.

One man expresses himself, or delivers his message to humanity, through his inventive ability to give his fellow men that which will emancipate them from drudgery; another delivers his message through his artistic ability; another through science; another through oratory, through business, or his pen, and so on through all the modes of human expression, each delivers himself according to his talent. In every case the highest motive is beyond the question of mere living-getting.

The great artist does not paint simply for a living, but because he must express that divine thing in him that is struggling for expression. He has an unconquerable desire to put upon canvas the picture that haunts his brain. We all long to bring out the ideal, whatever it may be, that lives within us. We want to see it; we want the world to see it.

It is not so much what men get out of their struggles, as the inherent passion in every normal man for self-expression—to do the biggest thing possible to him—that urges them on. This is what keeps men going, always struggling to achieve.

Some tribes believe that the spirit of every conquered enemy enters into the conqueror and makes him so much stronger. It is certain that every business or professional conquest, or financial victory, every triumph over obstacles, makes the achiever so much larger, so much stronger a man.

The exercise of the creative faculties, the stretching of