In our mobile society, many of us have had the experience of
setting a price for selling our house or condominium. Drawing on the
knowledge of a real estate agency, on information from friends,
acquaintances, and newspapers, we set an ideal asking price, a minimum
bottom price, and a price we expect to get. We learn from observing the
performance of other people or groups-both those we see as our superiors
and those we see as our inferiors. And we observe the wins and losses of
those we think are most like us. From these observations we set our
levels of aspiration.
We can think of these as the ideal, the minimum, and the realistic
levels of expected achievement. The fine between ideal aspirations, on
the one side, and grand illusions, on the other, may be thin but it is
there. It is the line between aspirations that have some chance of
realization and a reality-escaping fantasy.
The ideal and the minimum are the "best case" and 'worst case'
scenarios. The realistic level usually is the level of just manageable
difficulty. To achieve more requires a performance/capacity ratio that is
too demanding; below this level, we are underloaded.
There are obvious individual differences in the willingness to take
risk, but studies have not been able to find any personality traits
consistently related to such differences in risk-taking behavior. Some
people set their aspirations so high that they often fail. Others set
lower levels and more often exceed their aspirations. In raising
aspirations after winning, one person may advance slowly, inch by inch or
five percent at a time, while another person attempts 50-percent
increases in achievement.
Social custom influences us to set our aspirations higher. In our
daily lives, the mass media intrude to influence our standards. The
rising aspirations for good health have exceeded what is realistic. As a
result, since about 1970, health professionals in both England and the
United States are encountering more self-reported ailments than before,
when the definition of "feeling well" was set at a lower level.
Similarly, "how to" books on sexual fulfillment may have raised
performance expectations and thus increased a sense of inadequacy.
Yet we also understand the "happy loser." Placing second in a
contest may not be considered a loss if our performance exceeds our
expectations. If we know ahead of time that winning is not possible, then
our aspiration may become simply to make our best effort and make it
close. Subjectively, this is winning.
I hear "second place only pays off at the racetrack," but this is
not always true. Whether it pays off depends on what we are after. If we
are shooting for first place and miss it, then there is no payoff. If we
are shooting for third place and win second, then our victory is even
greater than we hoped.
The main body of research on shrinking aspirations is about work
careers. For most timed and ordered careers, positions can be ranked
according to money, power, and prestige. The nearer you get to the top,
the harder it is to move up the pyramid. In general, at each step up the
corporate ladder, there are 30 percent fewer jobs than on the rung below.
Young lawyers joining a firm may work sixty-hour weeks for six or seven
years and then only one fourth of them become partners. Out of the one
thousand who work in an advertising firm, at least one hundred, if not
more, may mistakenly believe they will end up with the top job.
Some aspirations are of little importance to us, and we can reduce
them with ease. Others mean more to us, and we may never get over our
failure to fulfill them. Psychiatrists may say that giving up part of our
lives should cause mourning over the loss.
This may indeed happen during the transition, and the mourning may
last longer than that in some cases. But the more likely emotion is joy
at finally ridding ourselves of hopes that have turned heavy with
disappointment. In the end it is relief, not grief, we feel as we relax
into a state of lowered ambition.
Fire at Evening
A popular view of ambition through life is that there are just so
many jumps in the rabbit, and that these get used up along the path to
old age. But the myth of no ambition in old age will not hold up. A truer
picture is that the rabbit keeps jumping, but the jumps are not as high
nor as far as in the early years. The drive for growth and mastery is
still there, but not as obviously as before.
It is also a mistake to assume that the diminished endeavors of
one's later years are not as meaningful as the grand plans of one's
youth. The level of performance may decline on an absolute scale, but it
remains pegged at the level of just manageable difficulty. The familiar
channels for growth and mastery are now dosed to them, and they must find
new challenges.
From the baby in the crib to the 100-year-old man feeling the
texture of the earth in his window boxes, we look for challenges that are
right for us, for what we can just manage, and in this way form and shape
our fives and conduct our many missions.
Illustrations (2): (WARREN GEBERT)
ERRATUM
On page 96 of the May/June issue, we mistakenly credited Poseidon
Press as the publisher of She Said, He Said: What Men and Women Really
Think About Money, Sex, Politics and Other Issues of Essence by Elizabeth
J. Wood and Floris W. Wood. Copyright c 1992. The correct publisher is
Visible Ink Press, a Division of Gale Research Inc. Psychology Today
regrets the error.
Tags:
achievement,
ambition,
dean,
farming,
flowers,
gaps,
goal,
growth opportunities,
Harvard,
hillside,
legs,
level of aspiration,
muscular strength,
northwest connecticut,
ohio state university,
pride,
rational mind,
risk,
rural education,
self-assessment,
talking books,
windowboxes,
young man
