What's Driving You is Ambition (I'm Betting)

or, ambition and wealth are not related

I listened to an episode of the Give Them Lala podcast today in which Vanderpump Rules Lauren “Lala” Kent interviewed Real Housewives of New York’s Brynn Whitfield, which proved to be the perfect confluence of my two guiltiest pleasures.

The two gals – with sporadic, kind of weird interjections from Jessica and Easton, Kent’s regular co-hosts – covered a wide array of topics, from how to give a great blow job (honestly, I almost turned off at that point, not because I’m a prude, obviously, but just because that’s not something I think can be taught through the medium of podcasting but maybe I’m just a visual learner) to the difference between LA and New York and why it is that Whitfield goes for men with money.

I’m paraphrasing here, because I can’t find the exact time stamp and the episode is over an hour long, but she ultimately tells Kent that she just really, really values ambition, and goes on to say that wealth is such a sign that a man is ambitious, and that’s very sexy to her.

Kent does a lot of mmm-hmming throughout this explanation, only short of shouting “yeah, girl!” at Whitfield – I am pretty sure she does, in fact, shout this at several points throughout the interview, which was another bug bear for me.

I hate a sycophantic podcast interview; while I love Elizabeth Day’s writing, I stopped listening to her podcast, How to Fail, as each and every interview (without fail) was preceded by a monologue in which she expressed just how much she enjoyed speaking to this person, with a (slight) variation on the sentence, “I could have kept on talking to them for hours!”

I was particularly aggrieved when she said this about Made in Chelsea’s Jamie Laing, who seems like someone who is best taken in small doses, but maybe that’s just me.

Anyway.

Whitfield’s assertion that wealth is so closely related to ambition gave me pause, because it’s simply – and obviously –not true.

I remember reading a Refinery29 money diary (no, they didn’t copy me, I copied them, so sue me) a few years back in which the diary-writer spoke about how she and her partner worked out who paid for what. He worked on Wall Street, in some high-paid financial role that had to do with aircraft leasing or hedge funds (or both, who knows), while she was a teacher, who also tutored high-school students in her spare time.

They both worked long hours as a result, but in the diary, she detailed how she did more of the housework than he did, because – and she wasn’t complaining about this, merely stating it as fact – he contributed more financially.

So: because her work time was quite literally worth less than his work time, due to some arbitrarily decided notion that teaching is less valuable than money management, he seemed also to think that her leisure time was worth less than his, and should be spent tidying the house.

Because he contributed more in terms of money, she had to somehow “make up for that” by taking on more of the housework (which, honestly, who among us doesn’t anyway… but I digress). His time off was more important, because his time on was more important, and the reason he thought this? Because he was equating his salary with the value of his work.

Of course, there’s the argument that she could have gone into finance, too, and maybe she could have. Money diaries don’t do a great job of giving a tonne of context, so we didn’t know what her background was; how much her parents earned; how she did at school; whether or not she could have made it to an Ivy League school, or toughed it out in the world of finance and accounting, which sounds, honestly, exhausting and horrible.

But what if she didn’t want to go into finance? What if she wanted to go into teaching, in the knowledge that a career in teaching is never going to be the best paid career going? Does that mean that she’s not ambitious?

If ambition is best displayed in terms of one’s salary – six figures plus only, please – does that mean that teachers can’t be considered ambitious? What about nurses? Paramedics? Graphic designers? Artists, even?

Sure, there are artists who will “make it”, and by “make it”, I mean, produce work that sells for five figures, although that work can often take months, even a year or more, to create, and earning five figures for a year’s work is not exactly Richie Rich territory by most standards – but for the majority of artists, and florists, and make-up artists, and hair stylists… they are not career choices that are made with high earnings in mind.

Oxford defines ambition in the following two ways:

1. a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.

   "her ambition was to become a pilot"

2. desire and determination to achieve success.

   "life offered few opportunities for young people with ambition"

…while “success” is defined as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose”, and there is nothing to say that aim or purpose is in any way related to finances.

In a capitalist society, of course, we can assume that the broad definition of success includes a nod – several nods – to monetary success. Dolly Parton wasn’t pouring herself a cup of ambition before chilling out for the day and maybe taking her dog for a walk, after all, was she?

There is an almost evangelical belief that prolonged, persistent hard work will lead to material success; a rudimentary search for quotes about ambition leads to numerous suggestions that ambition is nothing without persistence; ambition is nothing without hard work.

What’s interesting about this belief, in fact, is that, according to a 2012 report by the Pew Research Center, titled, peppily, ‘Pervasive Gloom About the World Economy’, the more money a person has, the more they are likely to hold tight to this idea that “most people can get ahead if they apply themselves”.

The fact that this correlation is made by Whitfield – a biracial woman who was born in Indiana to a mother with addiction issues, later going on to be raised by her grandmother – is where my surprise truly takes wing.

Surely, as someone who was born into poverty and experienced child neglect at a very early age, Whitfield would have seen ambition take many forms in her family and the society she grew up in, and recognise that people can be ambitious in ways that don’t define success in monetary terms.

Maybe I’m just asking for too much critical thinking from my Bravo stars. (I’m mostly joking; I genuinely think both Kent and Whitfield are smart women who have a lot to say on a variety of important and interesting topics, but I know that their origin stories – on Bravo reality shows – might lead people to think otherwise.)

I would love to know, though, do you consider yourself ambitious?

And, if you do, what does success look like to you?

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I just finished People We Meet on Vacation, an Emily Henry book I thought I’d already read – and, honestly, wasn’t sure I hadn’t read until probably halfway through – and I… didn’t love it? Maybe there’s only a certain number of books I can read by a single author without feeling as though they’re repeating themselves, I’m not sure.

I was also… bored by yet another “petite” lead character! Ali Hazelwood is terrible for a tiny science woman. Can someone please, for the love of god, suggest some contemporary women’s fiction (heavy on the romance, smut always welcome) that features either a plus-sized girlie or a female character whose weight and size is never mentioned?! PLEASE.