Hello friends and everyone in this amazing community. I've got to discover this amazing community today and I can't afford to miss this amazing prompt for the week on greed and ambition.
What is ambition? It is that strong desire or drive to achieve a goal.
What is greed? It's the selfish desire to get something.
Now, talking about the differences between ambition and greed, I'll be giving a more detailed explanation under these headings below.
Focus
For ambition, the focus is always towards achieving goals, improving oneself and impacting the world. It's the desire to build something better without negative attachments or inner desires.
Greed as I said earlier, is an excessive or selfish desire to get something. For greed, focus is always on wealth or power rather than achieving something great and improving oneself contributing something bigger to the society.
Drive
Ambition is driven by the desire to excel in one's engagements, the desire to make a difference and impact the life of others. No negative personal benefits attached to ambition.
The perfect words to describe greed when talking about the drive is “relentless, insatiable, selfish.” It's a relentless desire to achieve something regardless of ethics. Greed is one of the major causes of political crisis as it remains the selfish desire to gain power or acquire more wealth.
Service
Ambition could involve serving others to achieve their satisfaction or goal but greed is completely selfish and self-serving.
Greed is never aimed at serving others or making greatness to impact others’ life but for one's selfish interests.
Without saying much, one can definitely see that there's a clear difference between greed and ambition with the few points I mentioned above and to add to that, ambition can be fulfilled and bring good rewards but greed is insatiable, never satisfying.
The question now is, “Can ambition eventually turn into greed? Why?
Yes! Unchecked ambition can actually bleed into greed.
Now, to answer the “why” question.
Remember, ambition is focused on achieving a goal and contributing positively to society. Now, when ambition goes beyond limit, greed comes in and dominates. Take the life of a doctor for an example.
A doctor's ambition is to save lives but greed comes in when such doctor isn't satisfied with his pay and decides to secretly engage in illegal organ harvesting. This is when his ambition goes beyond limit and the greed for money has set in.
This is an amazing topic to discuss but at this juncture, I'll drop my pen.
This is my entry for the QC community weekly contest #138.