Carefree Ambition

One reason I believe our work on virtue sets is intellectually valid is because it is valid to my experience. It accurately reflects what has happened.

Mellow ambition, carefree hunger, easygoing striving, Type-A hippy, all sound like contradictions in terms. But it is a real thing. It isn’t just moderation between being happy go lucky and being a plucky goal guy. Its somehow capturing the good element in both at the same time and rejecting the bad element in both at the same time.

When I was in college there were guys who desperately wanted to get married and tried supremely hard and they got no where.

There were guys who were apathetic and they got nowhere.

Eventually you reached this state where you cared but didn’t care, where you were easygoing about the whole thing but also focused on your goal . . . and then you got married, often times through what seemed like purest happenstance. I half believe because being able to capture the virtues of being easygoing and being hungry at the same time is a conspicuous display of mastery. Very impressive.

Carefree —–> VIRTUE <—–  Ambition

But what it wasn’t was doing the Aristotelian thing where you go halfwayish between the two extremes of being a total grasshopper and being a total ant and camp out halfway in between. Lo, nature’s perfect work, the grassish-ant. It really is a synthesis where you take two different things and combine them and discover the master virtue that lies underneath them.

I think this is something like becoming as a little child, which is not the same as being a little child.

Child —–> VIRTUE <—–  Adult

The other experience has been with myself and my children. Partial impartiality, neutral favoritism, disinterested interest have been the formula for success.

(Re reading that last paragraph I see that I have been very unclear. I don’t mean this has been the formula for picking between my children. I mean that this is the formula for managing anyone you love and are responsible for, whether it be yourself or your children. You manage them like you are completely biased in their favor but also as if you had no bias at all.)

Objectivity —–> VIRTUE <—–  Caring