Ambition can be a good thing, when it's channeled the right way.

The desire to become more than we now are — we all feel it. We teach it to our children, when we expect them to "amount to something."

The problems arise when we start deciding what the "something" we're supposed to "amount to" should be.

Regardless of my opinions of the candidates running for president right now, I have to be in awe at the strength of their ambition. Look what they put up with! The schedules they keep, the way they have to beg for money, the necessity of watching every word they say, so that they make their potential voters feel good without annoying anybody too much.

I imagine myself in their position, and I don't think I'd last three days before I said, "This is crazy, I'm going to speak my mind, sleep in till 10, and I'm not going to suck up to rich idiots in order to get their money."

Of course, within a week I'd be out of the race, so it would be easier just to announce I was no longer a candidate.

Fortunately, though, I already know this about myself: I'm just not ambitious enough.

Well, that's not true. I'm extremely ambitious. Just not to be president.

That's how we find out what our true ambitions are, isn't it? We see what we want to accomplish so badly that we'll do what it takes to achieve it.

Our innate hunger to grow, to be greater, to achieve something — it starts out as an inchoate longing, a sort of restlessness. Until somebody tells us a story that we want to fulfil.

As a kid, I remember latching on to dream after dream. I read a book about the history of medicine, and I wanted to be a doctor. I read Bruce Catton's "Army of the Potomac" and I was going to go to West Point and become a general. I read Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon Tiki" and "Aku Aku" and I was going to be an archaeologist.

The trouble was that once I found out what it took to pursue any of these dreams, I realized I didn't have enough ambition to do the required work. Instead, I did the things that came easily to me: performing, directing, writing. I even got paid for doing the last one, and voila: I had a career.

But none of these was my real ambition. The focus of my ambition had been formed early on. In my parents' home, I was raised with the sure knowledge that the outside world was where you had to go to earn a living, but your true life's work was in the church.

My parents both worked, and worked hard. But the joy of their lives, the work they put their whole heart and soul into, seemed to me to be their church service.