Ambition In The Company Man By Ellen Goodman

753 Words2 Pages

Ambition is a powerful tool to have. It breaks people down and mends them into stronger people. Even during the low times, ambition calls out to you and encourages you to do hard work to reap the benefits. Ambition also has consequences if misused. It can lead to a lonely life as with too much ambition, you block people out of your life and focus solely on yourself. You could be scarred from your ambitions if you fail after putting in that energy and work. Ambition is valuable if used correctly because it can lead people to their goals and make them blind to their everyday surroundings. Ambition fuels people to reach their goals in many different ways, but they all come from one thing. The desire to be better than our past selves. Maybe it’s …show more content…

“The Company Man” by Ellen Goodman dives deeper into Phil, who is dead by the end of the story due to overworking. Phil had an ambition with his job and even though that ambition is good, he ended up dead due to not taking in other things. Phil worked above the limits of his body, and didn’t pay attention to his health, and his family, which he never realized as he worked to death. People commented that “He worked six days a week, five of them until eight or nine at night, during a time when his own company had begun the four-day week for everyone but the executives. Phil was overweight and nervous and worked too hard. If he wasn’t at the office, he was worried about it. Phil was a Type A, heart attack natural. You could have picked him out in a minute from the lineup” (Goodman). By focusing on one thing for a long period of time, you disregard all the other important things in your life, as health is just as important as money. Something people say is that health is wealth and what that means is that you can get more out of your life if you have better health. Health can also go into many different ways, like mental health and emotional health, but for Phil’s situation, he didn’t take good care of it. That ambition took Phil so far that he broke down from work every day until he died. One thing to learn from ambition is that it isn’t good to be so focused that

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