Are you thinking closely?
On ambition, agency, and optimism.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
One of the most significant social & cultural structures that existed during the Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance Period was the system of patronage. In a time before academic institutions and government grants, when creative exploration was simply not a viable endeavour, men and women from a wide variety of backgrounds invested directly in individuals to further the cause their beneficiaries were pursuing. They’d either commission specific works, or they would simply offer their support which typically lasted for many years to come. Although patronage could take many forms, during the Florentine Renaissance period it most commonly occurred as patronage of the arts, where the elite class provided support to painters, sculptors, and musicians.1
Patrons often came from rich families who used their money & influence to foster these young artists into being. Their protégés would get room, board, and a stipend in some cases, allowing them to freely indulge in their work without the strain of financial survival. These sponsorships were of vital importance to the culture at the time, since artists generally didn’t start work on their projects until after they had received commissions. There were many famous patrons throughout the centuries, but the most prolific of them all has to be the Medici family. Their banking dynasty made them one of the richest and most powerful families in Europe throughout a good portion of the Renaissance period. Their influence reached the Catholic Church, government, and even the royal families at the time, but they were not least known for their sponsorships of the arts. Under their patronage, they supported Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Donatello, Botticelli, and Raphael. And those are just the ones from the top of my head. That is an insane line-up, and there were many, many more. Not only did their patronage directly shape Renaissance culture, it’s rumoured that their funding was responsible for the invention of the piano and opera(!).
Patrons were advocates for ambition. And with ambition I don’t mean in the narrow sense as we’ve come to know the word today, with its ruthless character and an implication of zero -or negative-sum outcomes. I mean in the way it was originally regarded. The simplest belief that a single person could do great things, given the right amount of attention and resources. A belief, I might add, aimed at individuals over outcomes, not even preoccupied with the actual fruit of their labour but simply the labour itself. It showed an investment in a conviction, rather than a reward for a past accomplishment. All in all, it was an act of faith in humanity. It is no surprise then that art and humanism in Florence flourished under the reign of House de Medici.
When I look at the world today I cannot help but wonder where all the patrons have gone. There are some modern day examples, but they are few. Besides the Thiel Fellowship, the MacArthur Fellows Program, and Emergent Grants, I can’t think of any notable ones that come close. Why is that? Have we come to believe we are incapable of grand things, or do we simply no longer desire it?
These days, a good portion of conversations on aspiration and ambition inevitably end up at debates on inequality. Because ambition is not ‘inclusive’. It’s a luxury you can afford when all the other boxes have been checked. And while I suppose that’s true to some extent, that’s not what I’m getting at. While not everyone can be ambitious, ambition can, and should, serve anyone. Contrary to popular belief, we do in fact live in a positive-sum world. Ambition’s product is innovation, and innovation never only touches the vessel it was born in.
We live in a power-law distributed world. Most things aren’t caused by and shouldn’t be aimed towards the masses. Forced inclusivity weakens the intention of your strategy. It’s often enough to only marginally do better where it matters, to push up the whole significantly. That’s a powerful realisation; it pays to only have a few more truly ambitious people. But for that to happen you need to aim towards the tail ends. Focusing on the majority simply doesn’t work when extraordinary is what you’re looking for. Greatness comes from individualised strategies, it’s seldom an institutional game. This is exactly what made patrons’ efforts so extremely successful. They recognised the value of unscalable attention aimed at an individual, with the possibility of outsized results that benefited all. No one is worse off because of Da Vinci or Michelangelo. On the contrary. The works and inventions of a select few enriched an entire culture for centuries to come.
Maybe it’s useful to step away from ambition in the obvious sense of the word. Consider this piece by Donald Hall, where he talks about ambition in aspiring poets. This is the kind of ambition I’m getting at:
“True ambition in a poet seeks fame in the old sense, to make words that live forever. If even to entertain such ambition reveals monstrous egotism, let me argue that the common alternative is petty egotism that spends itself in small competitiveness, that measures its success by quantity of publication, by blurbs on jackets, by small achievement: to be the best poet in the workshop, to be published by Knopf, to win the Pulitzer or the Nobel. . . . The grander goal is to be as good as Dante.”
I want to be clear: democratisation is a good thing. It’s made the majority of the people in this world a whole lot better off. What I’m saying is that if you’re a smart person that knows they’re a smart person, shooting for the tail ends might be a strategy worth pursuing. (Good thing all of us have such an undistorted view on how smart we are.) There is value in reaching for the impossible if you’re the kind of person that might be able to make impossible things happen. It’s tricky. The ‘you-can-change-the-world’ heuristic is one that will only work for a select few. But at the same time we desperately need more people adopting it. We tend to treat probability problems like the lottery. The chances of winning are so slim so why bother playing? But this is not the lottery and the stakes are quite the opposite; we stop playing and the consequences are disastrous. We need as many players on the board as we can get, even if that means losing some pawns.
I think much of the scepticism towards this heuristic comes from the doubt that it’s actually a good one. But the heuristic works in a world where people believe there are still things left to uncover. That there are things open to change. It’s not that the heuristic isn’t working, it’s that it stops working well when we no longer believe that we have the human agency to make things happen. Have I mentioned that it’s tricky?
Lately, it has become more prevalent to distrust a ‘creating out of nothingness’ strategy. It seems as though we’re more and more moving to an indefinite world where people believe progress is embedded in the fabric of society, as some sort of undisputed law of a free market economy. You see it trickling down to a lot of organisations. In a lot of companies, on most levels, there is a complacent reliability on the system as a whole, an expectation that it just works. As if progress is an inherent characteristic of the cogwheel itself rather than a consequence of a deliberate strategy — everything will get better because of some sort of principle that it should. I tend to disagree. I believe the greatest ideas come from very deliberate action-planning, not from the conviction that marginal improvements will move us forward. But along the way we’ve lost some of the agency and some of the belief that we can make it happen ourselves. It might come from a disbelief in our own reasoning abilities, fuelled by a hyper-rational —or maybe pessimistic— view of the world. “We couldn’t possibly plan for the grandest future we can imagine, so why even try?” After working for a while, I found that people who purposely build are rare, and the places that allow them to do so even rarer. But that is exactly what we should aim for. We need people who not only believe the future is bright, but also screw in the lightbulb themselves.
Is it not great to believe that change can still come from our own hands? How exciting that there still exist parts of the world where you can uncover something that’s not working for us at all, and then try to come up with a way to make that better. As Soros rightfully points out;
“The contention that all human constructs are flawed sounds very bleak and pessimistic, but it is no cause for despair. Fallibility sounds so negative only because we cherish false hopes. We yearn for perfection, permanence, and the ultimate truth, with immortality thrown in for good measure. Judged by those standards, the human condition is bound to be unsatisfactory. In fact, perfection and immortality elude us and permanence can only be found in death. But life gives us a chance to improve our understanding exactly because it is imperfect and also to improve the world. When all constructs are deficient, the variations become all important. Some constructs are better than others. Perfection is unattainable but what is inherently imperfect is capable of infinite improvement.”
Is it so wrong to be optimistic?
While ambition needs optimism, without agency it is a static place. A world where nothing ever happens but where everyone is convinced that it will. It is also a view that I see more and more. Optimism shouldn’t be a state of denial. It is an acknowledgement of the current state of the world while still believing the future can be bright. Because of that, functional optimism hinges on a belief in human agency; that we’re actually capable of making a change for the better.
Pessimism, on the other hand, is easy. It’s enough to take a quick glance at the world to believe that everything is going to hell. Open up any newspaper, or turn on CNN. It doesn’t seem to be going all that well. Pessimism is taking the world as a given. It requires no action whatsoever. You tell me which one is more difficult.
I can tell you which one is more popular, though:
“Without a doubt, the world is broken. We consistently fall short of our collective ideals. And yet, We know the world has gotten dramatically better and while history reminds us that progress is not inevitable it shows that we can take action to make a better world. It's a simple enough idea but one that seems increasingly out of vogue in a world where cynicism has become a hollow shorthand for intelligence. Afraid of being labelled naive, too often our discourse is characterised by hostile, knee-jerk scepticism that doesn't allow much room for doubt or wonder.” — Brandon Stewart
It’s become endemic. Instead of scepticism towards every idea, we need more of a “yes, and”-approach.
Are you still with me?
What this approach asks for is A LOT of arrows towards the board, and a lot of players wanting to take a shot, even when the chances of missing are substantial. What we definitely don’t need is more people doing the same thing. Whenever we see things that work for other people, we naturally wonder if there is a reproducible recipe behind the success. But there is no virtue in imitation. I’d wager the outcome of such a strategy is as bad, if not worse. So why not try to take a shot potentially only you can make? Being your own person is the kind of cliché advice that’s actual good advice, especially when more and more people have a personality that more closely conforms to an algorithm than anything else.
Useful ambition finds itself off the beaten path. Many smart people know this and already walk that line. That is also the reason why genius often goes unchecked; we have no idea how to spot intelligence outside of experience paradigms. When people explore without a legible objective in sight, we have trouble assigning them with any kind of value. It’s also what makes ambition so incredibly difficult. It’s hard to wilfully take the road that potentially leads to nowhere, and you’re always only as flexible as your circumstances allow you to be. I suppose that’s where the inequality comes from. For that kind of creative exploration you need leisure time, which in a world without patrons is a privilege only money can buy. Now, whether there is a considerable overlap between the most intelligent people and the richest is questionable, but patrons solve exactly that problem; it gives the more dim-witted rich a useful seat at the table.
If I had to boil this down to a single piece of advice it would be this: try to find novelty and do things that seem interesting to you. Which coincidentally is also just a great philosophy for life. It’s an unsatisfying formula because it’s a long-term game with no clear view on the outcome, which is more uncertainty than most are comfortable with. But the alternative is just strutting along aimlessly, living a life of consumption and never really considering the possibilities of the world.
Life requires some thought and ambition is imperative if we want to solve the bigger structural, intellectual, cultural problems of our time. If you still believe things will come your way, you are wrong. Thinking, doing, creating, … These are all hard things but extremely virtuous in their own right. Life without design is erratic. There’s nothing amiss with finding your path or trying things out, but things in life should be done with a certain deliberateness to them instead of a ‘we’ll-wait-and-see’ kind of attitude. Try to look at the world through the lens of your own intellect instead of through the eyes of others. It will open up roads beyond the existing tracks. They might be hard to spot but next time you find yourself looking, ask yourself: Are you thinking closely?
Patronage extended to academia and sciences as well, albeit in lesser part. Galileo famously benefited from the contributions of House de Medici.
Once again amazing read. Love your takes on this matter!