[ambition] macchiavelli eat your heart out

Talent spotted early

Tiberius wrote, concerning clubs:

Have you ever read C.S. Lewis's science fiction? If not you should - he has some really interesting things to say about the human desire to be part of an inner ring and how it can never be satisfied - the truth is that these things always disappoint.

As the following post is a bit "preachy" let's imagine it's directed to a promising young man on the way up.

The higher you rise, the more you're going to run into ambition and to those who know how to turn a young man's ambition to advantage. I'm thinking of Ed Balls here though the post is not about him.

It is about ambition and it's limitations and one of the first principles to recognize is that if your talent exceeds your ambition, they'll come to you. If the other way round, you'll always be seen as a soft touch but soft touches have gone on right to the top before, e.g. Warren Harding.

Clubs are where likeminded people gather [except for Blogpower] but they're more like terraces on different levels and so when you're invited for cocktails and are honoured by the step-up in company, it's quite important whether you were invited on your achievements to date, your position or your potential, rather than on your ability to wangle an invite.

In other words, when you make small talk with a Mover and Shaker, what are you hoping for? To be seen as a rising star to be kept an eye on? To score a second invite? Look at it through his eyes - his only interest in you is in how you can either help him or his cause. It's possible you're there because word has got around that you'll do much to "move up" and that immediately puts you on a string.

[No words]

If you're one of those and you can align yourself with the important people's common purpose, [for example, in my early teaching interviews, it was the done thing to be pro open-plan classrooms and to throw grammar out the window], what do you then do when the weather changes and it's now the done thing to be reactionary?

The word "hack" hovers round the keyboard, wanting to be typed in, to describe such as these. Leo Amery's example was apt:

For twenty years, he [H.H.Asquith] has held a season ticket on the line of least resistance and has gone wherever the train of events has carried him, lucidly justifying his position at whatever point he has happened to find himself. [July 1914]

Coming back to the terraces at different levels, it becomes obvious, early, to the ambitious young man, that certain members are of more importance than others but a major mistake is to think of them as stepping stones.

For a start, they themselves are trying to score invites to cocktails according to their own vantage point from the terrace they happen to be on and you are not exactly a major priority at this stage in their game plan. This is what gatherings are all about - people will always subdivide for more meaningful repartee with those they value as contacts.

The only hope is that you were there for your talent in the first place but that means you possibly have your own mind and opinions. What will you do - compromise these in order to move up? Or stick to your guns and force them to either adjust to your current project or else marginalize you and move on to a more malleable rising star?

Young man with eyes on the stars

The only way to overcome the social disadvantages of having a brain, [or even of not having one, for that matter], is to have something people want and that's every businessman's quandary. Once you have that though and are sociable enough anyway, the rest should follow up to a point.

But you must accept that you might have reached your highest point early and do you really want Disraeli's slippery pole as a way of life? Wouldn't it be better to strike out laterally into virgin territory and to blaze a new trail? Looks better on your CV resume as well.

The other advantage to this is that when you're nakedly ambitious, there is a tendency for the people below or "moved on from" to mutter to one another and quietly slip a spanner in the works when the opportunity arises. "Uppity", "Johnny-come-Lately" are the epithets which could stymie you in the most puzzling ways.

I really like the adage about "treating people well on the way up because you'll meet them again on the way down".

Forgetting the little people is a major mistake - remembering them might not materially assist you but it doesn't hurt to create a friendly field to operate in. Jeffrey Archer's "Colonel Bullfrog" deals with just this.

A chap just now referred to this by saying that humility and honesty are not necessary innocent qualities - they can be effective weapons and that was interesting because another chap here earlier in the day received a call from an irate client and I watched with interest as he was caught out.

With an apologetic sigh, he told the woman: "I forgot. Sorry." Then he dealt with the matter and I could hear the tone of voice change at the other end. He does a lot of this straight down the line honesty business. His company profits have gone up 17% in the last year.

When's this post going to end? Soon. S'pose the moral is that it's better to carve your own course [and you'll find yourself rising anyway] than to tailor yourself to someone else's needs, in a vague hope of admission to High Society.

I'll watch the path of Ed Ball's further career with considerable interest.

Pssst - wanna be a cardinal?