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Ambition: Final Word or Dirty Word?
I want to share with you the concluding section of an article just published by the Texas Photographic Society.
The article is titled “Managing for Success.” In it, I outline the basic principles of managing an artistic practice: time, money, and relationships. These principles apply to any kind of artist, not just photographers.
The concluding section is entitled: “The Final Word: Ambition.”
The Final Word: Ambition
To make any of this work, you need to begin at the end. What is your personal vision of success? Where do you want to end up? Without a clear sense of where you are heading, you won’t have any way to map your journey. You won’t be able to make distinctions between what is more or less important to achieve in a given day, week, month, or year.
Lately I’ve been noticing that, as willing as artists and creative professionals are to publicly share their work with the world, they are very shy about publicly stating their professional ambitions. Won’t such revelations sound arrogant, or naïve? And what if I end up falling short?
“Ambition” has gotten a bad reputation. It conjures up images of Icarus and Enron and Lady Macbeth.
But what ever gets accomplished without ambition? The ambition to wipe out poverty drove Mother Teresa. The ambition to release the space of the flat canvas drove Jackson Pollock. The ambition to become president drove Bill Clinton.
Take some quiet time to consider your own lurking ambitions. Acknowledge them, and honor them. They will fuel your practice management. They will remind you of why you want to keep going, even if you’re tired and discouraged.
And they will help you to prioritize.
When you start out, everything needs to be done. When you are (finally) up and running, you are (happily) offered more and more opportunities. In either phase of your photographic career, how do you know how to spend your time, where to invest your money, and which relationships to develop?
Your ambitions will tell you. Use them as your guide for prioritizing, by simply asking yourself in every instance: “How much will this activity/investment/relationship advance me toward my ambitions?”
Want to read the complete article?
Best,
Ann
June 2005