Quotes About Ambition

Some people want it to happen. Some wish it would happen. Others make it happen!

I'm a firm believer in goal setting. Step by step. I can't think of any other way of accomplishing anything.

I can handle failing, but I can't handle not trying.

But the vast majority spend their lives with their backs bent, their noses to the grindstone, making no financial progress whatever.

If your ambition is to maximize short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview.

Years later he would say that when he'd decided to become a professional baseball player, it was the only time he'd done something just for the money, and that he'd never do something just for the money ever again. He would never again let the market dictate the direction of his life.

But everyone wanted to be a Big Swinging Dick, even the women. Big Swinging Dickettes.

There was one sure way, and only one sure way, to get ahead, and everyone with eyes in 1982 saw it: Major in economics; use your economics degree to get an analyst job on Wall Street; use your analyst job to get into the Harvard or Stanford Business School; and worry about the rest of your life later. So

That was somewhere near the middle of a modern gold rush. Never before have so many unskilled twenty-four-year-olds made so much money in so little time as we did this decade in New York and London.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising. —Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

I'm doing something I always dreamed about doing, and it was about the most depressing moment I've ever had in my life

As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended.

Success was his chosen form of revenge.

People who want very badly to win, and to be seen to have won, enjoy a tactical advantage over people who don't. That very desire, tantamount to a need, is also a weakness. In Billy Beane, the trait is so pronounced that it is not merely a weakness. It is a curse.

The long-shot bet, in some strange way, was a young man's game. Charlie Ledley and Jamie Mai no longer felt, or acted, quite so young.

The Yankees understood what New York understood, that there was no shame in buying success, and maybe because of their lack of shame they did what they did better than anyone in the business.

WHEN HE WAS a young man Billy Beane could beat anyone at anything.

This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael's friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage.

When you say, "Whoa! I knew I was good. But I didn't know I was this good." After that it became a complete obsession for me. I was going to go to an IIT. My dad would come into my room at three in the morning, and I'd be studying! He would say, "Swaroop, you must go to sleep, you know."' Kittu

I ask them if it ever troubled them to devote their lives, and expensive educations, to a trivial game. They look at me as if I've lost my mind, and Paul actually laughed. "Oh, you mean as opposed to working in some deeply meaningful job on Wall Street?" he said.

All around him men hunched over their BlackBerrys. They wanted

He'd detected a pattern: a surprising number of the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come from places without well-functioning governments.

The person who makes his living searching for the new new thing is not like most people, however. He does not seriously want to sink back into any chair. He needs to keep on groping. He chooses to live perpetually with that sweet tingling discomfort of not quite knowing what it is he wants to