Daily Blague

A recent encounter has set me to thinking about ambition again, about the kind of ambition that I've never had - the ambition to shine.

We all want to shine in some way or another. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than the kind of letter that I received from a new Australian reader the other day. There's no need to quote it, because all you need to know about it is the deep pleasure that it gave me to read that what I'm doing here is appreciated. I will never receive an excess of such letters, I assure you! So I can't say that I don't want to shine. I do, I do.

But the ambition to shine entails a certain something else: a willingness to do things that have nothing to do with, in my case, writing. At the head of the list of such things, in my case, would be the pursuit of official recognition and credentials. Don't misunderstand me; I don't mean to be sniffy about marketing, as if it were ignoble. Marketing isn't ignoble - if you're any good at it and it pays off. But I'm no good at it at all, and the failure has been almost deforming at times. It's as if trying to position myself makes me uncertain and awkward, and I don't even do what I'm supposed to do well well.   

The minus side is that I'm toiling in obscurity, which is no fun if you like to shine, and everybody likes to shine. The plus side is that my growth has been entirely natural. I haven't concerned myself with things that were fashionable, or cranked out sawdust to meet deadlines. For years - from college through my twenties - I filled notebooks with self-centered who-am-I ramblings that I just may burn unopened one of these days. The sheer solipsism might give me a tumor! It was writing about music for the radio station's program guide that sounded my first good writing, but that was gratuitous as well, in every sense. Eventually, the Internet reinvented correspondence, and my letters to friends kept tending toward the fully-shaped critique of something or other. Me voilà.

What's new and different now is that I am finally, at fifty-eight, doing something worth being ambitious about. You may not agree, but that's not the point. The point is that I've never done anything that I took seriously in the way that I take writing for my sites seriously. In whatever else I've done, I've been guided by a sense of duty to others; now I'm goaded by a responsibility to myself.

My failures at marketing in the past, therefore, may have simply reflected a lack of conviction. Could I learn some new tricks now? We'll see!