Careful ambition

Five weeks ago, with exams finished and days to spare before Intersession, I marched proudly out of Labyrinth with 20 new books under my arm. The shiny covers stared out at me, and I was happy. This was going to be a superb Intersession: a bit of knowledge and a bit of skiing. I packed my suitcase, books included, and jetted off for a week of pure, unadulterated fun.

One week later I returned to campus. The skiing box ticked, I’d also managed a few pages on George Washington. But reading turned out not to be as fun and attractive as it seemed on that sunny day when I exited the bookstore. I never got past Washington’s early skirmishes in the Revolutionary War. Now, as the workload grows again, and the new semester spirals forward, it’s becoming more and more difficult to turn back the shiny covers. And the new classes that I looked forward to, the new classes that were once an East Egg “green light,” full of hope and academic expectation, turn out to be classes. They are like the classes of last semester. They require work, sweat, blood and maybe tears. I just realized that, once again, it’s going to be a tough term in New Jersey.

The same thing happens in all aspects of my life. In the gym, it’s easy to throw a couple of hundred pounds on the bench press. It’s just weight. I can imagine myself lifting it. So maybe I can lift it. Turns out, I can’t. It surprises me every time. Playing chess or soccer, writing novels and music: I can imagine it all. Knowing the basic skills, I can imagine the utopia where I’m skillful in every arena. But when it comes to acting, most often I just land flat on my face.

You may not feel the same way or just not feel it so strongly. But you will have experienced something similar. Once in your life, you will have expected more from something than was eventually provided. Our imaginations are powerful. As often as they provide hope and cause ambition, they are also the foundations of disappointment. This is especially relevant at Princeton. Things appear to be going well: We’ve been accepted into “prestigious” colleges, regularly patted on the back and our egos relentlessly massaged. As a result, it’s not difficult to adopt overinflated hopes and desires. These greater-than-average visions of the future can be useful but will leave us with further to fall if we don’t succeed. If we don’t take care, our imaginations can cause huge upset and disappointment.

However, we can also be too cautious. Michelangelo is supposed to have mused that the “greater danger for most of us” is not that we set our goals too high and fall short, but that we aim too low and reach them. While imagination can be a destructive and disappointing tool, we have to remember this idea. We must not forget to set our ambitions high. If we are careful, our imaginations can be used to minimize disappointment, while also maximizing innovation and achievement. It’s possible to keep our expectations low, while simultaneously elevating our aims. As Princetonians, we should continue to use our minds to dream of great things, but not be disheartened if we don’t always reach our goals.

“Imagination encircles the world,” Einstein once said in a 1929 interview. He was acknowledging the power of human vision. Powerful minds can manufacture everything from intense disappointment to positive, wide-reaching ambition. C.S. Lewis, in his “Screwtape Letters,” emphasized the difficulty in the “transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.” Imagination can lead to disappointment when reality arrives. However, we can avoid the bad side. Dreaming aspiration must not necessarily become laborious doing. We need to find that compromise where our expectations are set low and our ambitions high. We can be ambitious, consistently give our best in the moment and always aim for better, and then there will be nothing more left to do. If things go to plan, that’s brilliant. And, if not — if you never read the books you bought — that’s also fine: You did all you could, you never expected anything from your ambition and there’s still time ahead to improve. Look after your imagination, and it will look after you.

Philip Mooney is a freshman from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He can be reached at pmooney@princeton.edu.