I am Always Late

Have you ever had to deal with too ambitious people? Then you know how hard they can be to live or work with. Their life is directed to achieving and having the best: attending the best schools or colleges, receiving the most prestigious and highly paid jobs, aspiring to occupying the most respectable and highest social positions, socializing only with the best and the most respectable people, and so on. Sometimes they achieve what they want, sometimes they do not, but those who can observe the life of too ambitions people can confirm the idea that too high ambitions do not make people happy. Very often, too high standards and too high expectations from everything and everyone make people disappointed, depressed, unsuccessful, lonely, and – always late, too.

Moreover, as the latest findings by a group of experts at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business have shown, being too ambitious and always aspiring for the best can be linked to even a shorter life. A group of scientists led by Timothy Judge, professor of management, tracked personal and professional success of 717 people for over 70 years, starting from their very childhood. The experts took such factor as the participants’ education level as one of the basic indicators of their ambitions. Those who graduated from Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Berkley, Stanford, or other very prestigious educational establishments certainly got better jobs, had more prestigious occupations, thus, were considered more ambitious than those participants who received their diplomas from colleges and less prestigious universities.

It turned out that high ambitious really helped people achieve very high professional success. Positive effects of ambitions on career achievements were obvious: ambitious people studied harder, they managed to enter the best universities, get more prestigious jobs and higher salaries. However, those ambitious people who seemed to “have it all” actually suffered from adverse effects of their demanding attitude to life in their personal life. “Despite their many accomplishments, ambitious people are only slightly happier than their less ambitious counterparts, and they actually live somewhat shorter lives,” Timothy Judge commented on the findings of his fellow-scientists.

Thus, ambitious people turned out to be less lucky in their marriages and were less likely to be able to  establish good and healthy personal relationships with their life-partners. They had big hopes and dreams about their private life, however, very few of those dreams came true. These people probably made too high investments in their professional life and career, they had extremely high motivation for achievements, but spend less efforts to built healthy private life. Timothy Judge warns the parents whose children are too ambitious in their studies to be aware about the effects of this tendency on future personal life of the children. “If your biggest wish for your children is that they lead happy and healthy lives, you might not want to overemphasize professional success. There are limits to what our ambitions bring us or our children,” he said.

Definitely most of us have such friends or colleagues who are always late, so it is necessary to wait for them all the time. It happens all the time, when they’re getting ready to go out or must  finish up something they are doing. And, the most irritating thing is: such people do not feel responsible or sad because of their nasty habit. This can be really frustrating and depressing, but, unfortunately, we have to deal with such kind of people quite often.

Have you ever thought that social level and wealth of people can play a role in developing bad habits like being always late? The scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have published the findings of their study which state that wealthy people actually tend to behave unethically, especially towards other people around them.

After analyzing people’s social rank based on such factors as education, wealth, the type of occupation and occupied position, etc., the experts came to quite surprising and unexpected conclusions. It turned out that those who achieved professional success, who have some wealth and are occupying relatively high positions in the business organizations are actually have much stronger tendency to such things as cheating, breaking the law, telling lies, and demonstrating other types of unethical behavior. At that, in most of the situations such behavior is directed to other people, or on making the life of other people harder and more problematic.

As the experts underline, more and more of current events are showing that relatively wealthy and rich people are actually more greedy and more focused on own interests and problems compared to the people with lower income. In particular, the analysis of San Fransisco experts have demonstrated that those who have more expensive cars are more often involved in traffic accidents and cut off other cars. In the framework of other experiment, it was found out that wealthier people tended to admit that they used lies and other types of unethical behavior in order to win in a card game or receive a 50 dollar prize.

In a similar way, wealthier and richer people do not see anything unethical when they are 1 or 2 hours late for their meetings. However, according to the experts, the top moving factor of this tendency is feeling power. Having some financial savings make people believe that they mean something and have power. That’s why they are convinced that they have right to cheat, lie, and show all other type of unethical behavior toward other people.  There thoughts and always fed up from being greedy and being scared of the necessity to share their power with others. Certainly, the UC experts underline that the findings should not be applied to all wealthy people of modern times.