SUCCESS

Is the key to success striving? As in strife? I’m not so sure.

For some reason, in most things some level of success has always been easy for me. But with one exception I never felt compelled to excel at anything. Not in sports, or in other kinds of performance, not in academics or public honors, not in wealth or recognition. The one exception has been my profession, and from my very first day as a teacher until the very end of my career, I always strove to be the best teacher I could possibly be.

What that means, I suppose, is that I have failed at everything except my profession. I have failed as a philosopher because I have not been totally dedicated to arguing out what I believe. I have failed to influence political life as I should have because I never believed in it enough to let me commit myself to it. I have failed friends with my diffidence, and have failed to love as I should have when I should have because I was afraid, for one or another reason: afraid of the absoluteness of absolute commitment. But I have been absolutely dedicated to teaching my students about commitment to the good, in everything I have taught them, while never being able to offer myself to them as an example of such commitment.

Would it have been better—for me, or for us—has I striven hard, or harder, for success? I’m sure that striving for success would have been bad for me, except as I have striven for it in the least selfish thing I have ever done, which is teaching. I wish I had been able to love less selfishly, and thus been able to strive for success in love.

And I wish I had been a better teacher. I know enough about teaching, now, to know how to have been a better one fifty years ago—though maybe having to learn how to teach was part of being a good teacher. Sometimes I think the passion for finding out how to do it is worth just as much as knowing how to do it: but then I think of handling a hammer and driving nails, or parachuting, and I know I’m wrong—at least about driving nails and jumping out of airplanes.

I suspect we will never satisfy ourselves as to whether doing a lot of good is worth as much as doing something best—whether our ambition should be to do as much as we can that’s good or something that is the best. The jack of all trades but master of none, versus the master of mucus, or money. I suspect, however, that a wise ambition toward the impossible—that’s called idealism—generally enables us to help achieve a lot of the possible for us all along the way. A wise ambition: so we have to know what it means to be wise.

Bert