Ambition: How We Manage Success and Failure throughout Our Lives - Softcover

A look at the creative strategies people use in their personal and professional lives draws on the latest psychological and social research to show how humans adapt to winning and losing

From birth to death, all humans strive for growth and mastery and everyone experiences - and must learn to handle - success and failure. How do people do it? Indeed, how do people evaluate success and failure when others often withhold information from them? How do people explain to themselves and to others the reasons for triumphs and disasters? Most important, how do people learn to "manage" ambitions, and develop strategies for dealing with failure, and what for some people is even more difficult: success? Does the pattern change as people age? These are important questions that everyone confronts every day. Drawing on the latest psychological and social research, and illustrating his argument with real-life examples from every conceivable social setting - school, courtship and marriage, the workplace, sports, games and gambling - Gilbert Brim shows how people adapt to winning and losing in ways that keep them at a level of "just-manageable difficulty", lowering their ambitions when they lose, but raising them when they win. In revealing people's strategies for handling success and failure, the book demonstrates that the capacity to change across entire lives is much greater than used to be believed was true. In addition, Brim dispells the myth of the mid-life crisis, calling it more "a useful fiction" than a reality.