Alan S. Oser

It has been my good fortune not to have achieved any of my early ambitions. I long ago came to believe that all of them were misplaced. How fortunate that I did not have to wait to achieve them to find this out!

Ambitions should be chosen with care. They should be realistic and achievable. Realizing this as a young adult, I set aside my earlier desires, which, more or less in sequence, were to win election to the United States Senate, to write a bestselling novel, to grow to a height of six feet, to become a famous foreign correspondent, to invent and patent something useful, and to beat my friend Ted in tennis. Of them all, I came closest to the tennis ambition, if a loss of 6 to 2 to a player who usually won 6 to 0 can be considered close to achievement.

When realism swept in on a wave of maturity, I adopted more modest ambitions and achieved greater success. Any sensible adult should do this, even in matters unrelated to career. The married man, for example, should aspire to a compliment from his mother-in-law. The portly man should aspire to the loss of five pounds by two weeks from Friday. The fashionable man should seek his triumphs in bargain sales.

These modest ambitions do not suffice for youth.

“Dad,” I said to Dad when I was a sophomore in high school, “after Princeton I’d like to go into the Foreign Service. I want them to send me to Sweden. I hear that Swedish women are gorgeous. Would it be all right if I married a Swedish blonde and settled in Stockholm?”

Dad wisely refrained from answering that question at the time, and never had to later since I didn’t get into Princeton. Nor did I acquire the manners of a prospective diplomat. I never got to Sweden, even as a tourist, and I didn’t date a blonde of any nationality. It was all for the best. Knowing more now than I did then about both myself and the Foreign Service, it is clear that we would have made a poor match.

To illustrate the dangers in the opposite course, I will invent a plausible life experience for a young man called Wendell. He is talented as well as ambitious, and as grand as his ambitions are, he at first fulfills them. But his thinking is short term. In the end, instead of taking satisfaction in his achievements, he is haunted by a sense of failure.

Wendell becomes a foreign correspondent working for a news agency – just as I wanted to do in Phase One of my misplaced ambitions. As a young man he serves the Associated Press in Kenya and Egypt. He is admired by peers and wears a stylish cap wherever he goes. Later he is sent to Paris, and there he marries a young American woman. Then he is assigned to Madagascar. She doesn’t want to go to Madagascar, but she does. Their first child is born there. They live there and in a couple of other places in Africa for six years.

They both want their child to go to school in America. Wendell seeks reassignment with his news agency but cannot get it. So he quits and comes back to America without a job. He can’t find one in journalism and is out of work for months. He can’t find his cap either. About this time the couple’s second child is born.

You see where I am taking this. Wendell needs work, so he takes a job in public relations. This is how he spends the rest of his career. He is never happy in his work. His depressed mood makes for an unhappy marriage. His wife has spent so many years following Wendell to foreign places that she has developed no marketable skills. When the children get a little older she finds part-time secretarial work. She doesn’t like the work and is not very skillful at it, but they need the money. They both look back on their lives in disappointment.

I am not Wendell. No sir!

I realized that long-term success depended not only on the work itself but also a solid family foundation. Work success, I decided, would depend on finding something that I could do fairly well, something that someone would want to pay for, and something that someone else with greater talent would not care to do at all. To neutralize the competition, first minimize it.

The latter realization came only after I had been thrust, kicking and screaming, into jobs that others were able to avoid precisely because of their greater talent. When the chief copy editor at the Wall Street Journal needed a deskman (as copy editors seated in the semicircular “rim” around him were called) to take over the makeup job in the composing room every afternoon, did he choose his speediest and most effective copy editor for the task? Of course not. Such a person could not be spared. I was the obvious choice.

I had barely turned 30 at the time, still a young squirt in the eyes of the hardened printers I had to face every day. It was my job to direct the placement of the metal type of the day’s news stories into the metal frames that represented pages in the next morning’s newspaper. The ads were there already. We had to fill the columns left for news.

The closer the time came to the ultimate deadline, when the edition had to “close” do or die, the more rapid the flow of type became from metal shoots around the room.

“Put ‘Congo’ on seven – ‘Congress’ on three,” I would shout amid a gathering pandemonium, my eyes rapidly surveying the 20 or 30 metal forms on broad tables in the darkened room, all of them manned by printers trained to obey every word. Never mind that the Congo story was five inches too long to fit in the form. As the makeup man I would “cut it in,” reading the type upside down and backwards and snipping off a sentence at the end of a paragraph here, an entire paragraph there, while making sure that the story still “read” – that is, had lost nothing in clarity.

This task, while terrifying to the neophyte, became exhilarating with experience. “Put it here! Put it there!” I found myself shouting gleefully in time. Self-confident skill, and a loud voice, overcame the snide attitude of my elders. Pretty soon I found a popularity with the printers that I had never found with other editors. Moreover, it turned out over the years that comfort and confidence on the makeup floor was a valuable asset for a newspaper editor. What I desired least was in the end what I found most valuable.

This anomaly should not be converted into a rule of conduct. We do not marry whom we least desire. We don’t spend money on what we least want. But when it comes to worldly ambition, we often misread the probable consequences of success.

Too much money leads many people into trouble. Even before it is wasted or lost, it can cause marital argument over how to spend it. He wants to travel and gamble. She wants to save it for the grandchildren.

If money should not be the goal of ambition; if outstanding professional success should not be the goal; if fame, prestige, power do not seem like plausible goals – what should the normal person aspire to?

Merely the respect of those who know us, I say. This will flow to those who show, in their conduct, a sense of purpose, a sense of decency, and a sense of humor. Cultivate these, stay healthy, and earn and save a little money. Life will then be satisfying. Hold onto your cap and hop to it.