On ambition.

My business partner dropped by today to snag the files from my old company. It was great to see him again; he's a funny guy, always on the up and up about high-end booze and the best restaurants and food markets in town. We caught up on what we've been up to since I left, knocked back a couple of shots, and he was off again.

We're very different people, he and I. He's a born leader, able to inspire confidence with his words, constantly coming up with ideas, ready with a steady hand at the wheel on the higher level. Me, I'm a natural second. I've always been a better lieutenant than a general, better as mortar than a brick. Leadership makes me uneasy, responsibility strains my nerves. I guide better than I direct. I fill gaps.

I've always felt that I let my father down in that respect. I'd been raised since childhood to believe that happiness lay in hard work and fiscal success, that I should assert myself and forge my way in the world, take the reins like a man and enforce my will. But if everyone was like that, where would we be? We can't all be leaders, we can't all smash our opposition and make our own way.

So if this is my lot in life, so be it. If it's my job to help others succeed and realize their goals, I'm more than happy to. And if, at the end of the day, all I can really call my own is a gin gimlet and a lawn chair in my backyard on a balmy spring day, I think I'm okay with that.

(Note: I recognize there's a line between having low ambition and outright sloth, and that I've skirted that line quite heavily in the recent and not-so-recent past. But there's got to be a happy medium, and damn it, I'll find it or die trying.)