Janapati 1

Ritika Janapati

English 9 H

Ambition Speech

5 March 2019

Ambition

You're sweating, panting, catching your breath and looking at your stopwatch. 5:45, a

new personal best. But it was just a practice round. The real race is tomorrow and you need to get

your gold medal. So you tighten your laces and keep running. Does this sound familiar, you keep

running faster, and faster even when you've reached a goal? Well that this is called ambition.

How will ambition get you to that gold medal? Will you train harder, push down the other racers,

or just give up? Well, I believe that ambition can push you to greatness or pull you to danger, but

it is also necessary to be successful.

Ambition causing positive change is seen in the article “The Age of Ambition” by

Nicholas Kristof. The article is about people helping those who are less fortunate than them

while also making money. Their motivation was ambition. “...Ariel Zylbersztejn … runs a

company called Cinepop, which projects movies … and shows them free in public parks. He

sells sponsorships to companies to advertise to the thousands of viewers who come to watch the

free entertainment.” Ariel is acting like Robinhood: Taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

Nothing particularly pushed him to do this, his own mind was telling him to run faster, be

ambitious, and fix this problem.

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Ambition can also lead to danger as seen in Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Macbeth

is so driven to become king that he thinks it’s okay to murder someone that is stopping him when

he hears the witches’ prophecies “My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, Shakes so my

single state of man ” (1.3.152-155) This shows his ambition leading to evil, dangerous actions.

With this ambition, Macbeth is like a black hole, he will swallow whatever comes in his way. In

the race Macbeth is running, he’s pushing everyone else off the track.

Ambition is necessary to be productive, you need it to push yourself to do something

worthwhile with your life. In the article “Ambition, Who Needs It?” by Jim Perskies, he believes

ambition is too much nowadays and that people should relax. “To all you ambitious folks out

there: Enough. I’ll gladly concede that you all ‘win.’ Just leave the rest of us alone. I’m going for

a bike ride now.” This is no way to live because your ambition and goals lead you to a successful

career and life. Ambition shouldn’t be trying to one up everyone else like how Perkies thinks, but

it should push you to be your personal best. Someone without ambition isn’t even in a race,

they’re a couch potato sitting at home and wasting away.

To recap, ambition can push you to greatness or pull you to danger, but it is also

necessary to be successful. Ambition can drive you to do great things like help the poor, but it

can also be dangerous and have you kill the king of Scotland, but ambition is definitely necessary

to do more than ride your bike all day. Let me leave you with this: What kind of race are you

running? And what will you do to get this gold medal?

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Works Cited

Kristof, Nicholas D. "The Age of Ambition." The New York Times. 27 Jan. 2008. The New York

Times. 25 Feb. 2019

Perskie, Jim. "Ambition? Who needs it?" The Washington Post. 16 Oct. 2015. WP Company. 25

Feb. 2019

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Penguin, 1967.