How to Be Ambitious Without Being a Jerk w/ David Brooks (Transcript) 

Just you wait.” It’s that anticipation, I’m going to build a future.

The Gleam Across Every Stage of Life

I’ve seen it in the middle-aged. Sometimes when my kids were little and they would perform at school plays, I loved to watch the parents as they were filming their kid on stage. And when they’re filming the kid behind the video camera, they’ve always got this big smile. And it’s a smile that says, I delight in this. I intensely care about this. This matters to me.

And I’ve seen the gleam on the very old. My dad is in a senior community in Haverford, Pennsylvania. And one night we were having dinner with some friends of his, and I was seated next to a guy who’s 100 years old. And he started talking about the lectures he was attending, the books he was reading, the conversations he was having. And I imagine at 100, that guy has lost some of the original passions that guided him through life — for sex, probably for fame, to make money. But the passion to learn stuff just doesn’t go away.

And the people I admire are the people who keep growing all through their life. They’re different at 80 than they were at 70, they’re different at 70 than they were at 60, they’re different at 50 than they were at 30. They just keep growing.

A Worldview Built Around the Gleam

And some days I think my whole worldview is built around that gleam. That my political philosophy can be summarized in the question, how can we build a society in which every child gets to experience that gleam, that sense of opportunity and possibility?

My personal approach to life — I’ve come to appreciate how important is the question, what are you loving right now? Love is not an emotion, love is a motivational state. Something outside of you has entered something inside of you and set off a nuclear explosion. And it can be a person, but it can be a subject, it can be an activity, but it’s set off an energy source. And if you want to go through life, you want to go through with the big engines rumbling. And love is what does that.

And love is not rare. If you want to know about me, ask me what I love. I love my kids, my wife, America, God, writing, my friends, New York City, the New York Mets, sorry, Bruce Springsteen’s music, Montana, Chesapeake Bay, intellectual history, my own mediocre athletic abilities practiced with great fervor. There are certain things we feel are beautiful and good and we must hunger for them, the novelist George Eliot wrote.

Another of my heroes is St. Augustine, who lived, what, 1,500, 1,600 years ago. I’m going to paraphrase one of his favorite sayings. “Give me a man or a woman in love. Give me one who may be in the faraway desert, but who yearns and thirsts for the springs of passion. Give me that sort of person.”

DAVID BROOKS: She knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold person, a suspicious person, a mistrusting person, or a calculating person, he just doesn’t know what I’m talking about. That was Augustine, 1,600 years ago, and Augustine said, we’re primarily not thinking creatures, we’re desiring cultures, and I think he was right.

Determination Over Raw Talent

I look at it this way. Some people who accomplish great things are smart, some are not so smart. Some are creative, some not so creative, but every person I’ve ever met who accomplished important things had determination and stamina. They worked really hard at what they did.

Tom Brady, greatest quarterback in NFL history, was passed over by dozens of colleges and many NFL football teams, because they measured his arm strength, they measured his foot strength, but they didn’t know he was the kind of guy who wanted success so badly. He was going to be able to run faster at age 40 than he could at age 20. They couldn’t open up his chest and look at his heart, and to me, that’s what you look at.

Quiet Passion: A Different Kind of Drive

Now, this is a point in the talk where people who know me say, David, you’re talking about Lady Gaga, Viola Davis, Alexander Hamilton. These are big electric personalities. I know you. You do not have a big electric personality.

It’s true. When I used to give talks, my speaking agency would send a host this introduction for me that they could read out and would capture my facts, and they were supposed to read it. The introduction ended with, “David Brooks is a social critic who introduces audiences to the problems of our time with insight and quiet passion.” I was supposed to get up when I heard the words “quiet passion.” That was the end of the introduction.

I came to hate that phrase, “quiet passion,” because basically, my agency was telling the audience, don’t expect Mr. Charisma here. That’s what “quiet passion” means. I was like, “dull fun.” “Quiet passion” is like “dull fun.” Who would want to have sex with somebody with quiet passion when you could have the loud kind? That would be better.

That’s just who I am. I’m the guy — you go to the grocery store and the automatic doors are supposed to open for you, they don’t know I’m there. Just no charisma.

But I’ve come to like “quiet passion,” that I’m not a big charismatic Lady Gaga kind of person, but I do have some desires and they don’t flow like fireworks, but they flow like a river, a slow river.

And so, for example, you could say one of the things I love is writing. When I was seven, I read a book called Paddling to the Bear and I decided I was going to become a writer and I’ve written every day in the 50-odd years since that day. Seven days a week, 365 days a year. My wife, when we were married, she thought we were going to have these nice leisurely breakfasts reading the New York Times together. I don’t talk to another human being until I’ve written 1,200 words. So I’m in there from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. generally. I used to wear a Fitbit and it told me I was napping. But I wasn’t napping, I was just doing what I was put on this earth to do and I guess my heart rate goes down. And so that’s my quiet passion.

Orienting Life Around an Ultimate Ideal

My moral philosophy is also built around the gleam. I’m a big fan of a book that was written in 523 by a Roman senator who was sentenced to death named Boethius, called On the Consolation of Philosophy. And he said, when you’re orienting your life, it should be around some ultimate ideal. It should not be around a lesser thing.

He wrote, “Do you want to pile up large sums of money? Where will you get it if not from those who have it? You want honors? How will you obtain them except by begging for them, by those who can have it? You want power?”

You will lie awake worrying about your own vulnerability. He said, if you desire small and finite things, your life will be desperate and you’ll never get what you want. 1,500 years later, David Foster Wallace gives an address at Kenyon College, a famous commencement and he essentially makes the same point.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And you had better worship God or some ideal or some noble truth because pretty much everything else you worship will eat you alive. You will worship money, you’ll feel you’ll never have success. If you worship looks, those will go away. If you worship power, you’ll feel vulnerable and powerless.

So both men separated by centuries and different sensibilities made the same point. We are infinite creatures designed for infinite longings. Wanting the finite things like a good car, a nice meal, totally fine. But if you orient your life around them, you’re orienting them the wrong way.

Infinite Longings and What We All Want

And for some people that’s God. God is infinite. But for me, if I look at human nature, I look at things almost all human beings want and they’re infinite. We all want belonging. We want to love and be loved. And if you love someone, there’s no end to that. It’s infinite.

We all want to understand things, to learn about the world. And the truth is infinite. It’s not like you arrive at the end of the truth and you understand everything. There’s no ending to that. We all want respect. We want to be admired by people whose admiration is worth having. That too is infinite.

We all want competence. We want to get better at the stuff we do. I walked by a stairway outside the post office in Washington, D.C. near where I live. And there were kids on skateboards trying to learn how to do tricks on the stairway, in the railings. And they’re falling, falling, falling, but they want to get better. I think we all want to get better, whether it’s gardening or cooking, whatever we want to do. We want to get better at that thing.

The desire for significance. The desire to have a sense of meaning and purpose in our life. I’m a believer in Viktor Frankl, whose book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that the ultimate motivator for human beings is the desire to have a sense of purpose and meaning. He was in the concentration camps and he found the people who had no sense of purpose and meaning, they died. And today when you look at suicides, very often it’s because people have no sense of purpose and meaning.

So these are noble things. We’re not just wanting things. Belonging. Respect. Dignity. These are infinite things. These are eternal virtues you can orient your life around if you want these things. And your desires are pointing you in the right direction. And I find life goes better when I’m gripped by that kind of infinite desire.

Gregory of Nyssa and Endless Longing

There was an early church guy, Gregory of Nyssa, in the early days of the Christian church. He said, all the philosophy around me is about rest. I solve a problem, I can relax. And Gregory of Nyssa says, how can that be? If God is infinite, and if I can understand and know God, that must mean he’s finite. And so Nyssa says, no, it can’t be we want rest. We want endless searching. We want endless growth.

And he has a beautiful commentary on the Song of Songs, which is the sexy love part of the Bible. And it’s about desire. A desire for a woman. And when he comes closer, the lover, she withdraws. And he chases after. And she withdraws. And he chases after. And each time he chases after, he reaches further and falls further in love. He knows more about her, and his desire for her intensifies. And Nyssa says, the best kind of life is endless longing. In fact, he says, heaven is endless longing.

As a Jew, I always had trouble with the Christian idea of heaven, like paradise. Like if you’re in paradise, what’s left to do?

And so I like Gregory of Nyssa. It’s endless longing. And if that’s true in the religious sense, it’s true in the secular sense. Marcel Proust, the great novelist, was on his deathbed. He was in agony, and dying, and really in pain. And a thought occurred to him that one of the scenes in his great novel, Remembrance of Things Past, I think it was a scene about death. He was like, ooh, I got that wrong. And so he says to his sister, bring me my manuscript. And he’s within hours of death, racked by pain, he rewrites the scene. I kind of like that.

The Long Road of Paul Cézanne

Paul Cézanne, the artist, he knew he wanted to become a painter pretty much his whole life. He goes to Paris as a young man, fails. Tries to get into the Grande École where he can learn to paint, fails. Has to go back, works at his dad’s bank, then goes back to Paris to try again, and he fails. He goes back to Paris, he stays there. His paintings were rejected by the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. He continues to submit paintings, 1864 to 1882, and everything is rejected.

Finally, he’s in middle age, which should be his peak years as an artist, and he decides, I’m going to stop showing. My work is not good enough. I’m not even going to try. So he does seven or eight years where he doesn’t show anything. And then his childhood friend was a guy named Émile Zola, who had become a great writer. And around this time when Cézanne is not showing his works, Zola, a really good friend, writes a book called The Œuvre. And it’s about two childhood friends, one of whom is a famous novelist who goes on to wealth and glory, the other whom is a failed painter who commits suicide. And he sends Cézanne this novel and says, hey, I wrote a book about us. And Cézanne never speaks to him again.

But at age 56, Cézanne has his first one-man show. Then a couple years later, his works are being bought. He has a show in the museum in Berlin, and suddenly people are beginning to notice. And he’s getting better. And his biographer wrote that what motivated him through all those dark years, the French word is inquiétude, I’m translating it, inquiétude, which is restlessness, which is drive, which is growth, growth, growth.

He writes to his son a month before his death at age 67, “I want to tell you that as a painter, I’m becoming more clairvoyant to nature. That is always very difficult to me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses. I do not possess the wonderful richness and color that animates nature.” So he’s just trying to capture what he sees. And he’s 67, he’s about to die, he’s still pushing onward. And after he dies, they recognize who he was. And Picasso says, “Cézanne is the father to us all,” really the foundation of modern art. And so that guy just kept growing.

Haruki Murakami: Running Toward the Novel

Another guy, Haruki Murakami. Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist, who was in college, he did not do well, and he thought about leaving. So he dropped out of school and started a little jazz club, which was hard. But he made the bills pay. And he was at a baseball game one day, and he sees a batter hit a double, and a thought pops into his head. You know, maybe I should write a novel. So he closes the jazz club, and starts writing.

And as he’s writing, he realized, I’m getting fat around the middle, because I’m not working the club anymore. So he says, I should take up an exercise. So he thinks the best exercise is running. It’s cheap, you can do it alone. So he starts running. And he’s the kind of guy when he commits to something, he really commits. So he runs six miles a day, six days a week.

Haruki Murakami’s Marathon Obsession

He starts running marathons over the next 20 years, 23 years, he runs in 23 marathons, many other long distance races, ultra marathons, and a bunch of triathlons. He’s a fanatic about it. He writes a book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what you notice in this book, is the guy hates running.

Here’s some sentences. “As I ran this race, I felt I never ever wanted to go through that again. Around 23 miles, I start to hate everything. I finally reached the end of the race. Strangely, I have no feeling of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is utter relief that I don’t have to run anymore. It was draining physically, as you can imagine. And for a while afterwards, I swore I’d never run again.”

So why does he do something he hates? Well, in part, because he believes life is about effort and getting better. He was a mediocre runner in his best days, but he just wanted to keep getting better. And he felt this act of slightly getting better and better at running helped him get slightly better and better at writing. He said, “Being a tough runner makes me a tough writer. And so I run because I like to write.”

And he writes, let’s see if I can find this passage. Oh, here it is. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you start to think, man, this hurts. I can’t take it anymore. The hurt part is unavoidable. Whether you can stand up anymore is up to you.”

And he writes at the end, “Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits, that’s the essence of running and a metaphor for life.” And he writes in that book, “I already know what I’m going to put on my gravestone. At least he never walked.”

And so he’s a guy driven by that same kind of passion.

Forces That Squash Passion

Unfortunately, there are things in our culture that squash that kind of passion. I’ll just mention a few forces.

Over-Intellectualization

The first is over-intellectualization, thinking everything is about brain power, everything is about intelligence, everything is about information, and under-emphasizing motivation and desire. Kids have incredible desire to learn. There was a study done by a woman named Susan Engle. The average three-year-old asks 104 questions per hour. And those of us who have been parents have been through that.

Then they get to school in their kindergarten, and the teachers, they all, in principle, like curiosity. But they know they have to cover content. And if kids start asking questions, they can’t get through the lesson plan. So they subtly send the message, no questions.

And Susan Engle was sitting in the back of a class as part of her research. And she’s in a science room, and the kids have found one of those old-fashioned scales that go up and down. And they’re playing with it. They’re trying to figure out how it works. And the teacher says to them, “Okay, kids, enough of that. I’ll give you time to experiment at recess. There’s no time for experiments now. We’re doing science.”

And so in her research, she finds by first grade, it’s not 104 questions an hour. It’s 2.3 questions an hour from the entire class. And by fifth grade, it’s 0.48 questions per hour. And she writes that if you lose your curiosity at age 11, you don’t get it back. And so that’s one way we crush.

The Spirit of Calculation

The second is what you might call the spirit of calculation. If you take young people and put them in a system where you’re competing for grades, for rankings, for admissions, then you’re introducing, you’re putting them in a system where they have to game the system to win. Tell me if this sounds familiar to anybody. And so they become cynical about the system. They become shrewd animals trying to calculate how can I game the system. Their parents become shrewd animals figuring out how to game the system and put admissions into places like this.

And pretty soon that calculating part, which is really about calculating time and resource management, how much can I devote to this, it begins to take over your brain. I love teaching. I’ve been teaching here since the 90s. I love this place. But I’m going to tell you about my worst moment as a Yale teacher.

It was about 10 years ago. I was teaching only seniors at that time, undergrads, and it was the last day of spring term. In fact, I think I taught into the reading week. And I asked students, okay, this is your last time in a college classroom, for all of you. This is the last time you’ll ever be in a college classroom. So what book have you been assigned over the last four years here that changed your life?

And there was a long pause and one of the students finally said, “Professor Brooks, you have to understand how we read here. I just read enough to get through class. I don’t read with the kind of passion and intensity that would allow a book to change my life.” And another student said, “Yeah, but I was assigned some books that I think could change my life. And I’ve set them aside to read after college.”

I felt like saying, well, if you didn’t read in college, I’m not sure you’re going to read it after college. And that was a sign to me that they were doing energy resource calculations. And they weren’t finding some book that just captured them and then devoting the next three weeks to it, which is what you need to do if you’re really going to be swept away, if you’re going to fall in love with a book. They were detached.

The Third Force: Technological Sloth

The third way to crush passion and the gleam is through what you might call technological sloth. I mentioned it takes hard work to achieve anything big. The paradox is people who put out effort dream higher. If you put out effort to something, it’s a sign you care about it and you begin to care more about the things you put out effort into.

What is technology? It’s a way to reduce effort in pursuit of optimization. It’s emotionally easier to text someone than to have a conversation. It’s easier to read a tweet than a book. It’s easier to look at an Instagram reel than read a poem. It’s easier to ask Claude than to write your own paper. It’s this huge invitation toward intellectual and spiritual sloth.

And my fear for AI, and nobody knows anything about AI and I don’t claim to know anybody else, is that the 10% or 20% of humanity that likes to think will use AI to power their thinking and they will be really impressive. But the 80% of humanity that doesn’t like to think will use Claude to substitute for thinking and they will get a wider chasm between the people who are privileged and the people who are not and who are exhausted. And it will be not only an economic chasm but a cognitive chasm. And so that also drains away passion.

The Fourth Force: Loss of Faith and Despair

The fourth force is loss of faith, is despair. The 21st century has been rough. There’s been a lot of loss of faith. The Iraq War caused us to lose faith in American capacity to project goodness abroad. Financial crisis caused us to lose faith in unregulated capitalism. The internet caused us to lose faith in the idea that if we only communicated with each other we would all get along. And the collapse of social trust has caused us to lose faith in each other.

And the most severe kind of loss of faith is loss of faith in the future. 69% of Americans say they no longer believe in the American dream. If you don’t have faith in the future, if you don’t see an avenue for yourself to opportunity, toward meaning, that’s going to diminish your expectations. You’re going to have a sense that I don’t control my life. The system is controlling my life and I don’t have agency here.

DAVID BROOKS: And so what you get with all these spiritual poisons, the sloth, the loss of faith, the calculating nature, is you get a lot of people who are, especially coming out of school, don’t know what their heart really wants. They don’t know the deepest passion of their soul. And so what happens is there’s a series of things you do. 80% of college graduates in America say they don’t know what they want to do.

I had a professor in Chicago named Leon Kass who said what distinguishes people is not their beliefs. It’s not their geography. It’s not even their ethnicity. It’s the ruling passion of their soul. Some people are lovers of understanding. Some people are lovers of pleasure. Some people are lovers of justice. But the ruling passion of the soul shapes them and determines where they’re going to go in their life and how far they’re going to go. But a lot of people, they haven’t yet figured that out.

The Four Responses to Not Knowing Your Purpose

And so there’s a bunch of options. There’s a guy at Stanford named William Damon who studies this. First option is foreclosure. You pick the first job that comes along, whether it’s right for you or not. And I just recently ran into a young man at Williams College. He got offered a job at Bain & Company after his freshman year. He was 19. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, but job security. He took it. Foreclosure.

The second is disengagement. About a quarter of people lower their ambitions. They just think, I’m not going to set myself up for disappointment.

The third is dreamers. Another quarter of the people, Damon says, are dreamers. They have vague ambitions, but no concrete plan. “I want to do something creative.” That’s a vague ambition. It’s not a life.

Finally, and the most common reaction, is conformity. I do what the world tells me is high status. And this can absolutely happen to everybody. It can happen even to Michelle Obama. In her book, The Coming, she describes she’s at Princeton. She doesn’t know what she wants to do, but Harvard Law School sounds kind of impressive. So she goes to Harvard Law School and becomes a lawyer, and then becomes a lawyer in Chicago.

And she writes in that book, “I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was pretty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how indebted I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken a wrong turn.”

And even Michelle Obama was estranged from her own heart. And so this is a loss of energy, a loss of vitality, a loss of national life.

Nihilism, Dark Passions, and the Loss of Faith

And so when you get this happening on a mass level, a loss of faith, what you end up with is a society with a lot of nihilism in it, a belief in nothing. A belief that whatever is lower is more real. All these lofty dreams about love, that’s all a mirage. And this is the language Donald Trump speaks.

And you end up with leaders who don’t arouse the bright passions, the desire for belonging, confidence, enjoyment, meaning. You get a lot of leaders and a lot of a national culture that is directed toward the dark passions, the unhealthy passions. And those are things like anger. Anger’s fine in short doses, but when it becomes a permanent state, it’s very corrosive.

Hatred — you can be angry at someone you love, but hatred is rejection of their entire person. And there’s a lot of hatred in America today. Resentment — resentment is about status. It’s the belief that somebody doesn’t recognize me. Finally, the urge to dominate, libido dominandi, which is the urge to have power over others. There’s a lot of that going on. And so we are in a state where a lot of people have lost faith and we’re in a swirl of these dark passions.

So you’d think the way to solve this entirely is just there’s like an easy solution, get rid of the dark passions, fall in love with stuff, and then your life will be great. And I recommend that as a first step. Orient yourself to the desires of your own heart, the ruling passion of your own soul. And this, by the way, is not an easy thing to find out. Because it’s happening unconsciously for most people, until something touches you.

I had that moment reading Paddington Bear. My daughter was five. She got invited to a birthday party at a hockey rink. And she spent the rest of her life, till today, playing and coaching hockey. She just felt home, at home. “This is my home. This hockey rink is my home.” She felt that at five.

Albert Einstein, when he was four, his dad gave him a compass. And he saw this, invisible forces of the universe are moving this needle. Maybe I’ll study invisible forces of the universe. He became Albert Einstein.

I saw an interview Annie Dillard did with a painter. And she asked her, why did you become a painter? And the painter said, “I just love the smell of paint.” It can be very aesthetic, where you discover that thing that touches you. And sometimes it starts small. But then it grows and takes over your life.

The Problem with Mixed Motivations

Unfortunately, we don’t have time for that. Unfortunately, that’s a start, but it’s not enough. If we could just fall in love with stuff and then lead pure lives, that would be great. But most of us can’t do that. Most of us don’t live in pure worlds.

I’m in media. I went into media because I like to tell the truth and make a point. But I got to generate clicks. A lot of people go into politics because they want to do some good for the world. They’ve got to win elections. A lot of people go into design a product and they want to build some great product. They’ve got to get market share. The world is filled with compromises. You have to make an order to get what you really want.

Secondly, I wish I didn’t need ambition. I wish I could just rely on my good-hearted altruism. And yet, I may start out to write a book because I think I have something to say or there’s a question I want to investigate. But writing a book is really hard. It takes me four years to write these books. And I don’t think I would have interest and passion enough to do it if I didn’t know my name was going to be on the cover. I like it when people think I’m clever. And I need that kind of shallow motivation to get me going.

And I have to make a living. This is how I make a living. And so I have mixed motivations. I have some good motivations to serve the world and make a point. But I have some pretty selfish motivations to people think I’m clever and make some money. And those mixed motivations mix with the noble motivations into a cocktail that’s very hard to separate.

And so if we’re going to acknowledge that we have mixed motives, both the altruistic positive desires and also the normal selfish desires, you’ve got to wrestle with those two. So you’re not corrupted by your own selfish desires.

Wrestling with Ambition

And so Abraham Lincoln, his first speech was about ambition. His partner says, “In him, ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” He was an extremely ambitious guy. But he knew it could be corrupted by ambition and for his desire for power. And so he wrestled with his ambition. He wrestled with it. And I think of the wrestling match as a bunch of little wrestling matches.

The first is the wrestling match between craft and reward. There’s a novel called What Makes Sammy Run written, I think, in the 50s. And there’s this sleazy character named Sammy Glick. And he wants to be a screenwriter, but he doesn’t give a damn about the craft of screenwriting.

The Wrestling Match: Extrinsic Rewards and the Failure of Ambition

He just wants money and fame. And so he’ll plagiarize, he’ll cheat, he’ll steal people’s ideas as long as he can get money and fame. He is someone who has failed the wrestling match. It’s all about the extrinsic rewards.

Wanting vs. Loving

Another struggle is between wanting and loving. When a man wants a woman, he wants to possess her. When a man loves a woman, he wants to honor her. Wanting flows from a void.

I hope some of you have seen the great movie Citizen Kane by Orson Welles. That’s about a guy who lost his family when he was a kid. He desperately had a void where parental love should be. And he spent the rest of his life trying to make money, become famous, amass power so he could fill that void. And in so doing, he made himself unlovable and could never fill the void of the thing he wanted most. And he led a miserable, lonely life.

There’s a guy living in Washington near me who was like that. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, just down.

Comparative vs. Non-Comparative Excellence

The struggle between comparative and non-comparative excellence. Some people just want to be good. But other people want to be better than. And once you’re in the better than business, you’re in the envy business. And you’re in the resentment business. And resentment is a passion that is a total poison on your soul.

When you’re in the resentment business, not only are you envying the other person, but you adopt a sour grapes mentality. “I don’t even want that stuff anyway. That’s for shallow people. I never wanted that stuff.” So you take the thing that’s of high value and you devalue it in your own mind. When you’re in the resentment business, you don’t even want to know about the world. You just curl in on yourself and convince yourself that you’re better than all the other people who have that thing.

And resentment — there’s a historian, a philosopher, Max Scheler, from the early 20th century, who wrote beautiful books on what a poisonous plant resentment is once it flows within you.

Ambition vs. Aspiration

And then finally, there’s the struggle between ambition and aspiration. Ambition is good. I like ambition, as you can tell. I feel like Alexander Hamilton. And I spend a lot of time on it. But aspiration is more important.

Ambition is the desire to try to achieve something else out in the world. Aspiration is the desire to become a better person in the world. So ambition is about something external. Aspiration is about something internal. How do I purify my heart? How do I resist my temptations? How do I fight my sins? And I wrote a book about that called The Road to Character.

And for anybody who’s thinking about getting it, I learned writing that book that writing a book on character doesn’t actually give you good character. And even reading a book on character doesn’t give you good character. But buying a book on character… I recommend that.

The Remarkable Adults Who Keep Growing

And some days it seems like a miracle when you think about all the forces in society that crush our ambitions. When you think about the way ambition itself is potentially corrosive with all the wrestling with the dragons that you have to do. Then it’s amazing that there are any adults who are the kind of people I admire, who keep growing, who are fully engaged, fully enthusiastic. And yet I see them all the time. Murakami, Cézanne.

One of the most remarkable books I read recently was Tina Turner’s memoir. Tina Turner, you know, grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee. She had a mom who left something to be desired. Bit narcissistic. She struggled in school. She had undiagnosed dyslexia. But she could think.

And one day she’s singing in a club and there’s a guy in the audience who’s already famous named Ike Turner. And those of us of a certain age know the story. Ike looks at her and says, “There’s my million dollars. I’m going to form an act that I can — Tina review. I’m going to give her her name.”

Tina Turner: Rebuilding Yourself From the Inside Out

DAVID BROOKS: Her name was not really Tina Turner. I gave that to her in licenses so Tina Turner didn’t even own her own name. And they have an act. And then he starts beating her. And he was a guitarist. He didn’t want to hurt his hands. So he took these wooden shoe stretchers and he’ll jam her in the face. Then he starts raping her. Then he starts having mistresses with every person he can meet. And at one point Tina’s keeping home and four of his mistresses are living in the home and she has to clean up after them.

Their wedding day he takes her to a civil court in Tijuana, Mexico. There’s no dress, there’s no kissing, there’s just signing a document. And then that night he takes her to a sex show in a whorehouse. And she wrote that sex with Ike had become an expression of hostility, a kind of rape, especially when it began or ended with a beating.

So this is the worst guy. And she decides that Ike had enough and she takes sleeping pills. And this was not a bid for attention, she really wanted to die. She was disappointed when she woke up in the hospital.

Finding the Original Self

And then she said, David White, the poet, says every person comes to a place at one time or another in their maturation of complete loss and deadness, a stark and frightening absence of creativity and enthusiasm when life seems to retreat away like a tide. And what you have to do, White says, is find the original child you used to be.

He writes, In effect somewhere inside of us the child is still running enthusiastically toward the horizon it once glimpsed. Our future life depends on finding this original directional movement in our lives, no matter how far we feel we are from it, and no matter how far we are into middle age.

So after the suicide attempt, Tina Turner decided, I’m going to build the kind of person who can stand up to Ike Turner. And so secretly she creates two Tinas. There’s Ike’s Tina, she’s still nursing him and feeding him and all that stuff. And then she’s going to create her own version of herself. She does a lot more reading, she starts meditating, she keeps a journal, and she’s developing her own voice. And it takes her 14 years.

The Moment She Fought Back

But one day they’re in the back of a limo going to some show and Ike starts cursing at her, and she does something she’d never done before, she starts cursing back. He beats her, she does something she’d never done before, she punches back. And they get out of the limo at the hotel, she gets out, her pants and her suit is covered in blood.

And that night she pretends to be Ike’s Tina, she cleans him up, she feeds him, but in the middle of the night she sneaks out of the hotel, goes out the back entrance so that entourage won’t see, runs across a highway, nearly gets killed by a truck, goes to a Ramada Inn, and says to the manager, I have no money, I have nothing, can you let me stay here for a night?

Reinvention at 40

And at age 40, she breaks off from Ike and does something that most people in the music business are getting out of the music business at 40 — she decides to launch a solo career as a sexy rock star at age 40. And she succeeds fantastically. So at age 70, she’s selling out 180,000 seat arenas in Brazil. And she marries another guy and she designs a wedding with 180,000 roses, which sounds like a lot of roses. But she remade herself.

And that’s someone who in the worst circumstances could have been filled with resentment, she decides I’m going to seize life. And that’s the gleam in a 40 year old, in a 50 year old, in a 60 year old, in a 70 year old. And when you find that, you find so many people living lives of pure meaning.

DAVID BROOKS: I’ll close with this story. I read about it in a book by a friend named Emily S. Fahani Smith. And it’s about a girl named Kate, who at 14 was hit by a car and suffered a severe brain injury. And she was rushed to Stony Brook Hospital on Long Island. And multiple surgery, rounds of therapy, long recuperation. Four months later, she returns to Stony Brook to have one more operation on the piece of her skull that needs to be adjusted.

And so she has the operation, it’s successful. She’s in her own room recuperating, and a guy walks in. And he says, “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the physician in the emergency room the day you originally came in, the day of the accident.” And he leaves. And somebody else comes in and says, a woman, “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the nurse who was there in the original operating team and started working on you the day you came in.” A couple minutes later, somebody else comes in. “Kate, you wouldn’t remember me, but I was the chaplain on duty when you came in. I spent time with your parents.”

And after the sixth or seventh person comes in, Kate’s dad goes out to one of the nurses and says, “What’s going on here? Why are all these people coming into her room?” And the nurse said, “For every 10 kids we see with this injury, nine of them die. There’s only one Kate. We need to come back. We need to see her, because she is what keeps us coming to work every day.”

And those are people who endure some suffering in that hospital, but they’re living lives of passion and meaning, and it’s a model. Thanks very much.

Q&A Session

DAVID BROOKS: So we have — I’ve left, well, 15 minutes. So if anybody has questions, we have at least one mic over there, two mics. All I ask is the questions be long and rambling with no questions. I see one right here toward the front. And if any students have a question, we’re going to prioritize you.

Should Psychology and Group Therapy Be Taught in Schools?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So you mentioned many instances of people with deep psychological problems due to mainly their upbringing, not being loved enough or the proper passion, and their whole life is ruined trying to fill that void. So why don’t we have in every single high school, not only in the United States, but in the whole world, four years of psychology along with group therapy and group parenting? Do you think that would make a difference?

DAVID BROOKS: I absolutely do think it would make a difference.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: So why don’t we do it?

DAVID BROOKS: We’re idiots. Yeah, no, I think one of the things that shocks me is that we spend so much time up here giving kids information, which people should have information. I teach at a university, but so little down here, just about what’s going on in your unconscious. And secondly, just basic life skills.

And so I think, like, I had one of my students here a couple years ago. She said, “I’ve had four boyfriends in my life, and they all ghosted me in the end.” Nobody had taught these young guys they need to have a breakup conversation. And I bet nobody had taught them how to have that conversation without crushing their heart. But there’s a way to do that. That’s a skill. And there are basic social skills. How to listen well, how to be a great conversationalist.

I have a friend who lived in Guilford, and he suffered severe depression for three years before his life was ended by it. And for three years, I tried to accompany him through depression. Nobody had ever told me how to talk to a depressed person. And I made some of the mistakes that a lot of people make. Like, I tried to give them ideas how to make the depression lift. And if you’re giving people ideas to make depression lift, you’re just showing you just don’t get it. It’s not ideas they lack. And so I made all the mistakes.

The Gap in Practical Life Education

DAVID BROOKS: And over three years, I learned a little about how to do it. And so nobody ever told me that. I’m reasonably privileged. I’ve had a lucky life. As simple as something how to end a conversation gracefully, nobody taught me how to do that. Remember, I went to my fifth high school reunion. And in those days, in a cocktail party setting, my only move to get out of a conversation was to say, “I’m going to go to the bar and have another drink.” So 20 minutes into my high school reunion, I was so drunk, I had to leave the reunion. I had like six drinks in 20 minutes. So those basic skills.

And even at a… One thing some schools do, and I hope to do a little this year, and maybe this talk was a version, is say at Villanova, I was at Villanova recently, they have every freshman has to take a course called “How to Do College.” And it’s practical advice on how to be a college student. And then as seniors, it’s “How to Do Life.”

I’m like, what do you think about the first year out of school? I had lunch with one of my Yale students a year after graduation. She said, “I’m totally unprepared for this. All of life when I was a student was station to station. There was the next paper, the next test, the next thing to apply for. Suddenly I’m out here in a vast ocean with no navigational markers. And nothing’s prepared me for this.”

And so I would tell my undergrads, your first job out of college is going to suck. So your only job is to widen your horizon of risk. Do something really crazy so forever after you can say, “Well, I did that.” And you’ll go through the rest of your life with a wide horizon of risk.

Students Are Hungering for Life Guidance

And so at the places where this kind of course is taught, students flock to it. The most popular course at Notre Dame is called “God and the Good Life.” One of the most popular courses here was that positive psychology happiness course. Now Miroslav Volf at the Div School teaches a course on “The Life Worth Living.” Students are hungering for this, but nobody got a PhD in how to teach life skills.

And when you get academics who are highly specialized, as the law school’s Tony Cronin once wrote, asking the big questions of life — what is life for, what is the ruling passion of your soul — not only don’t get asked, it seems unprofessional to ask. And so I think there’s a vast market failure that the undergrads, in particular, maybe all students, would be hungry to have some just practical advice on how to do this thing called life. And they don’t need, and that’s not being offered, and it’s not being offered to high school students, and there’s a lot of misery as a result.

Teaching the Social Skills Nobody Talks About

Somebody should teach young — well, I’m going to give my final talk on how to fall in love. Somebody should teach high school boys how to ask each other out on a date. I live near, in D.C., I live near a restaurant called Butterworth’s, which is the young Trump hangout for young Trumpers, and there’s a young woman in a magazine called The New Atlantis who is in this community, in the Trump community, and she says, “You know, let me tell you about my social life at Butterworth’s, or whatever it’s called. It’s like a junior high school dance. All the guys are on one side of the room, all the girls on the other side of the room, nobody’s talking to each other, but each side has very strong opinions about the other side.”

And that’s just a loss of social grace, and so I totally think we — everything we think is soft and squishy is actually hard and practical, and that’s what you’re talking about.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Right here. So to what extent do you think our ambition should be determined by what we’re naturally taught today?

Finding Your Ambition: The Slight Advantage

DAVID BROOKS: That’s a very good question, which I always think you find your ambition, because the typical story is you find a slight advantage you have over others. It doesn’t have to be a big advantage. A slight advantage. And then you think, oh, I feel special doing this, and that’s the way it was for me in writing. And then once you find that slight advantage, you work at it harder, and so you magnify your slight advantage.

And so I think most of us fall in love with something we intrinsically like to do, because if you don’t intrinsically like to do it, if you don’t find it fun, you’re not going to do the 16 hours a day of doing it. And sometimes I find students, and I found this problem with myself, the vanity of good intentions, where you think, I’m going to do good for the world, and I may not enjoy it, but I’m such a hero, I’m going to do good for the world. But if you don’t enjoy it, you’re probably not going to work hard at it.

And so I tell people, if you’re feeding starving children, and it doesn’t bring you pleasure, it’s not your calling. Other people will get pleasure and satisfaction out of it, but you have something else to give. And so that would be my basic approach to life until I read Andre Agassi’s memoir.

The Andre Agassi Exception

I recommend, this is one of the best memoirs of any kind I’ve read in the last 20 years. It’s called Open. And the odd thing about Andre Agassi is he was many times the number one player in the world. The guy hates tennis. His dad was a monster, made him play tennis, and his whole line all through the book, he says, oh, I hate tennis. And somebody will say, no, you don’t really hate tennis, you’re like one of the best in the world. He says, no, I really hate tennis. And he goes through the whole book hating tennis.

But he doesn’t have anything else to do. And so he plays tennis, and he keeps playing and playing. So Agassi is an example of hating the thing you’re really good at. And I guess there must be other people who have experienced that. Maybe they’re really good at music, but they hate playing. But I find that hard to believe, just because I don’t.

Andre Agassi is a unique case, a very brilliant man, and complete pressure by his father to be a certain sort of person. And he spent his life rebelling against that. But I think most of us, it’s the thing we like to do is more important than the thing we’re good at. Because the liking, the mastery, comes from complete devotion. You better be Marcel Proust, who really wants to be a good writer, if you’re going to produce In Search of Lost Time, or whatever they call that book these days. So I think there are exceptions, but you better like what you do. That would be my generalization.

On Not Being a Jerk

AUDIENCE QUESTION: I was wondering, could you talk a little bit more about the not being a jerk part of ambition? Especially because… Can I ask you for a friend?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Right here. Yes. Right here.

Yeah, I mean, the way ambition can make you a jerk is all those struggling, I mentioned those struggles, that you only care about the surface, the exterior. You use people as an instrument for your success. The Sammy Glick character I talked about, there’s a woman in the book who loves sex. And all through the book, she keeps telling people, you know, sex is just the most fun thing. And I would have sex with anybody except Sammy Glick. And she says, because with him, it would feel like a transaction.

And we all know people for whom any human interaction is what can I use you for? And that’s treating people as a means and not an end. And that’s jerkish behavior. The other problem with ambition is it’s often driven by ego. And I confess that I have a decent ego.

I call my ass to a TV studio every week. It’s not for the money, I can guarantee you at PBS. But you can get addicted to that. And I remember during COVID, when we weren’t seeing anybody, at first I was like, oh, good, I get to be by myself. But then eventually I was like, no, nobody’s come up to me on the street recently to say how much they like me. And when COVID ended, we could go out in public. I was like, oh, finally. And so that’s jerkish. That’s jerkish behavior.

It’s the self-centeredness. It’s the ambition of Susan Cain or frankly, Donald Trump. It’s not seeing other human beings. It’s having a consuming clock in your head. Like when I go to a gas station, I’ll tell you what thought I have in my head. It’s going to take me 90 seconds to pump my tank full of gas. I can get two emails done. And if you have a clock in your head like that, you are shortchanging your relationships because every relationship is time inefficient. That’s another good way to be a jerk.

And so mostly it’s ambition makes you less other-centered. And that’s why I separated wanting from loving because loving is the definition of other-centered. And one of the things about a desire is it’s very hard to control a bad desire. Like I would love to not eat pizza, but I love pizza. And I can’t stop myself. But if I have a better desire, I want to live long so my wife and kids will have me around. That’s a good desire replacing a lower desire.

A lot of women like to drink or like to smoke. But when they get pregnant, they give it up because their love for their child is more important than their love for cigarettes. St. Augustine, who I keep mentioning, said he defines sin as disordered desire. We all have a lot of desires and we all know some desires are higher than others. And if you tell me a story and I blab it to a dinner party, I put my love of popularity over my love of friendship. And that’s wrong, that’s disordered desire.

If you lie to make money, you’ve put your love of money over your love of honesty and that’s wrong, that’s disordered desire. These are all the many ways that ambition can make you a jerk.

A couple more — one down here and then we’ll go over here. Just a couple more, it’s almost time.

On Rediscovering a Love of Life

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Thank you. Thank you for coming to speak and thank you for taking this position at Yale. So in your final article in the New York Times, you put in a great Camus quote. You said that the men of Europe, quote, “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man. The secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.” What do you suggest for on both a personal level to have that love of life but also on a continent-wide or a worldwide level?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, very good question. And I think when he said Europe no longer loves life, I think he was talking about the kind of pessimism I was describing today. The kind of not loving the future, not being excited by your possibilities. And I think it comes from a loss of faith.

And where do you rediscover faith in the world? Well, you can rediscover it by finding some activity you’ve really fallen in love with. In my view, a university’s main mission is to help students find things to fall in love with. You find a subject, you find an activity, you find a group of people, and you’ve fallen in love with those things and you want to preserve that love through life.

And so it could be friends. I always recommend undergrads or graduate students find your 10 friends you like here and form a giving circle before graduation.

DAVID BROOKS: And after graduation, meet every year and contribute some money to a pot and then just meet every year for three or four days to decide where you’re going to put the money. And the purpose is not to give charity, which is nice. The purpose is to keep 10 friends who knew you when you were 22 through the rest of your life. You will not believe how important a resource that will turn out to be.

I went to a summer camp and there were — Hold Saybrook here. I have 60 people who knew me when I was 12. I can’t tell you how much I value those people and how much they orient my life and change my life. They don’t know I have a first name. They think I’m named Brooksy, that’s me. I’m just.

The Role of the Humanities in Building Faith and Trust

And then the other thing that helps you find things to have faith in, in my view, is the humanities. And I think I wrote in that piece, the humanities is everything that uplifts the dignity of a person. And so a great novel uplifts the dignity of a person. I think I mentioned Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” at the Grammys, if anybody saw that. It uplifts the dignity of a person. And you have faith in ideas. You get to have faith in a work of art. You get to understand and have faith in other human beings.

And so it’s the kindling of faith and trust, which is important, is faith that you will do what you ought to do. And the woman who had four boys ghosting her at the end of their relationship, she said, “I have no trust because people are untrustworthy.” But if you’re trustworthy, people can have faith in you, then they can have faith in humanity. And so it’s finding your community, finding your people, finding a subject you love, finding a cause you love, all these things. It’s arousing some sort of emotion in here.

Samantha Power and the Power of Indignation

I have a friend who went to Yale, and she was a sports journalist here, and she was an intern at CBS Sports one summer. And it was the year of the Tiananmen massacres in China. And she’s in the sports booth, but she’s seeing the feed from the news side of Tank Man, the guy who stood in front of the tank with his shopping bag. And she says, “That man is upholding human dignity right there against oppression.” And she felt indignation at what the authorities were doing to those students in Tiananmen Square. And she said, “They’re upholding dignity, I’m writing about volleyball.”

So she changed her life. She subscribed to the New York Times, God help her. And then she started caring about politics. And she went to Yugoslavia, and she wrote about that. She went to Rwanda, she wrote about the genocide there. And she served as Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations. Samantha Power. And indignation is a very strong indicator of where you should spend your life.

Finding Your Magic Circle

And then finally, finding a magic circle. Warren Buffett was nine, his dad took him to Wall Street. And some stockbroker there asked Warren, “What do you think I should invest in?” And he said, “That guy forgot that conversation 30 seconds later, I remembered it for the next 80 years.” Wow, those people are cool, I want to do that. And so it’s anything that sparks something in here.

Maybe one more question, maybe a fan. Thank you so much again.

Navigating Noble Ambitions Against Real-World Constraints

AUDIENCE QUESTION: My question is, I think there are a lot of young people, both in the college, law school, and whatever, who really do have noble ambitions and want to do something great for the world, but are frequently constrained by responsibility — Michelle Obama with debt, young people with fiscal and family responsibilities. So my question is, is there a way to do both? Do you have any advice on how to navigate around that?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, it’s just a practical reality. There’s a book coming out in a couple weeks by Jim Collins. Jim Collins wrote a famous business book called Good to Great, and a bunch of others.

DAVID BROOKS: He’s got a book out, I can’t remember the title, but he follows lives and sees who thrives for a long period during their life. And I wish it was a little more intellectually rigorous, but it’s good. He says everybody’s encoded to do something. He uses that word encoded, I don’t know what that means. But I would be, in his language, I’d be encoded to be a writer, that’s what I do.

And so he follows, for example, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. They were two of the musicians at Led Zeppelin. And he says, Robert Plant stayed within his codings his whole life. And he was offered tens of millions of dollars to bring the band back together and do another Led Zeppelin tour. He said, no, I’m growing. He gave up tens of millions of dollars because I’m just staying in my lane, I like creativity.

Everybody has encodings or a certain lane, I would put it that way, everybody has a lane. Patti Smith, you think her lane is music. Her lane is artistry, she’s just creative. So his rule is stay in your lane.

Finding Your Lane

I am a writer, I started a non-profit. I had never managed anybody. I had never been in a meeting. I worked at the New York Times for 22 years. I never went and attended a meeting. Suddenly I had to run meetings, run a budget, manage people. I was out of my lane. It was humbling when you’re out of your lane. So you’ve got to do the thing that’s your lane.

But, and Jim Collins says this, you’ve got to find a way to make the money work. And that’s just a practical reality. And so for me, I wanted to be like either a communist playwright — that’s true, that was literally my ambition — or I wanted to be a novelist. But I had bills to pay. So I became a journalist. And that paid the bills. And it wasn’t my dream, I never wanted to be a journalist. But it was a way to write, sort of stay in my lane and pay the bills.

And so I think these are the compromises we all make. But it’s finding the lane, and then how do I make the money work? And so, but I would not ignore the lane first. Thanks so much for your time and attention. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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