📘 Part 3: Ambitions

This episode's vocabulary

Aspire to smth. - to have a strong hope to do or have something.

Detrimental (adj.) - causing harm or damage.

Vigilant (adj.) - always being careful to notice things, especially possible danger.

Lofty (adj.) - high.

Inevitable (adj.) - certain to happen and unable to be avoided or prevented.

Status quo (noun) - the present situation.

Listless (adj.) - having no energy and enthusiasm and unwilling to do anything needing effort.

Drift through life (phrase) - when you don’t have a plan.

Wholesome (adj.) - good for you, and likely to improve your life either physically, morally, or emotionally.

Dead weight (noun) - the heaviness of a person or object that cannot or does not move by itself.

Intact (adj.) - complete and in the original state.

Fragment (verb) - to break something into small parts or to be broken up in this way.

Coherent (adj.) - if an argument, set of ideas, or a plan is coherent, it is clear and carefully considered, and each part of it connects or follows in a natural or reasonable way.

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Questions and Answers

M: So, let's talk about ambitions and young people. What kinds of ambitions do young people often have in your country?

R: Well, they all seem to either aspire to greatness or at least have some career ambitions like becoming vets, or doctors or movie stars. I think this isn't so different from elsewhere in the West, though. That could be detrimental, though. A few people have burning desires to be husbands and fathers or mothers and wives, it seems by comparison.

M: Why is it good for young people to have ambitions?

R: It can be difficult to lead a life with unarticulated desires, actually, that can have some quite detrimental consequences because your life is sort of directionless.

M: Should parents help their children to decide what ambitions to follow?

R: Well, I don't see why they can't play a formative role. Though there's always this danger of parents seeking to live their lives through their children and sort of chase their dreams that way by forcing them to do things they would rather not. Assuming parents are vigilant against this sort of behavior, though. Then they can be quite useful in helping children articulate what they want to do. After all, who knows you better than your mom and dad.

M: Let's talk about being ambitious at work. Why are some people ambitious to take on higher positions at work?

R: I would imagine a higher salary and recognition and power are driving factors. But they might have lofty ideals that they want to promote or personal goals outside of those that I mentioned that they want to achieve.

M: Do you think it's good? Do you think it's like, good to have ambitious people in a team at work?

R: I think so as long as their vision isn't competing with that of the company that they work for.

M: But if their vision is competing, and if their ambitions are different from the organization of the company from the administration, is it then a negative thing?

R: Yeah, that will be that will be very detrimental. Definitely. Well, it's sort of inevitable, I would think, if they're at odds with the company's goals.

M: Are ambitious people always successful at work?

R: No, it's not enough to be ambitious, especially these days. You need to be able to convince people to join or support you in the pursuit of your goals, or at least get out of your way. And you also need the resources to achieve and sustain your ambition, or you'll need to abandon it otherwise.

M: Can sometimes people overdo with this, with their ambitions? And like, can they have too many ambitions?

R: Um, they might have one or two main ambitions, but they could have like sort of minor supporting ones, for example. I don't think it's possible for people to have like lots and lots of big ambitions in life, your brain just can't sustain the focus on multiple goals of that size for so long.

M: And do these ambitions help people in their lives?

R: I think so. Assuming that you've like set realistic goals for yourself, and you have planned a path to success, then yes. But if you haven't, then, of course, it's gonna be a mess.

M: Let's talk about the need for ambitious people. Why does the world need ambitious people?

R: Well, otherwise, we'd still be living in grass huts. People are dissatisfied with the status quo, or people who are dissatisfied with the status quo and longed to change it can move us forward in ways you never thought possible. And that's extremely useful for achieving anything outside of some sort of agrarian existence.

M: Is it true that someone who is not ambitious, is at a disadvantage in life?

R: Well, that will depend entirely on what you want from life, won't it? If you meet someone as listless as you are, and you drift through life together happily, then it might not be a disadvantage, provided that you're both wholesome people. Of course, if you're if you have ambitions, and you're matched up with someone who doesn't, and there's sort of a dead weight around you, then that's detrimental to you.

M: Society values ambition more than other qualities. What do you think?

R: Well, to be honest, it probably values a lack of ambition more than ambition itself these days if the status quo is to remain intact. I mean, in order to have a functioning society, you kind of need people to be moving in generally the same direction. So if you have people with multiple big competing goals, then that will just fragment things and could potentially fragment things quite badly. You can sort of see this in parts of the West, although it's not a completely lost cause yet where people fly in all sorts of different directions. There's not really one coherent vision of how the world should be. And that can have serious consequences further down the line if it starts to spread to every aspect of the society.

M: Rory, thank you very much for your ambitious answers, ambitious vocabulary and grammar. Ambitiously for a high score.

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Discussion

M: So, you did use lots of synonyms and good collocations about ambitions. So first of all, aspire to greatness.

R: Yeah. But that's just another way of saying having big ambitions.

M: Yes. But that's a lovely synonym, right? So people aspire to greatness. So they are ambitious, or people aspire to have some career ambitions.

R: Yeah. You have different kinds of ambitions. You have career ambitions, life ambitions. But if we talk about ambitions, usually we talk about work and so career ambitions is good.

M: Yeah. You can say career ambitions, like becoming vets, doctors, movie stars, right? So famous bloggers. Rory, would you like to become a famous blogger?

R: I don't want to be famous. I just want to help people and have a quiet life. Really.

M: Oh, sweet. It's okay, dear listener, if you don't understand that, but it's fine. It's okay.

R: What, you don't understand wanting to have a quiet life?

M: Yeah.

R: Being famous is not good for you. Really.

M: Okay, okay. Whatever you say. So, Rory has used a very nice adjective detrimental, it could be detrimental.

R: Like being famous.

M: Yeah. For example, being famous could be detrimental because we know of paparazzi, we know of Kardashians. We know of Rory's favorite Megan Markle.

R: We don't know about my views about Megan Markle. But now they do. So if something is detrimental, it just means it's not good for you.

M: Yeah, it's bad. So instead of saying it's negative it's bad, say detrimental. It could be detrimental to your health. It could be detrimental. People have burning desires. That's a lovely collocation.

R: Yeah. That's another way of saying big ambitions.

M: Yeah, yeah, we have desires, we have burning desires, we have ambitions. We follow our ambitions, and the examiner can ask you a question, blah, blah, blah, what ambitions to follow. So children, should they follow their parents' ambitions? Right? And then you use use the synonym chase our dreams.

R: Well, maybe parents chase their dreams through their children. Actually, that's a good expression, isn't it? Living your life through someone or living life vicariously through someone. Like vicariously just means that you live your life through someone else's. So for example, instead of living their own lives and having exciting adventures, people do it through fictional characters, or they may be follow celebrities who get themselves into all kinds of situations.

M: So here you can say that parents wants to live their lives through their children, and parents wants to chase their dreams through their children, right? People at work could be quite ambitious, right? And they could have lofty ideals.

R: Yeah. Lofty ideals is just another way of saying like having...

M: Ambitions.

R: Well, no, it's not. It's a bit different. Lofty ideals are like, really high level, perhaps virtuous, which is just another way of saying, like, good for your soul. ideas about how the world should be. So it could be something like, well, I really wanted to help people. And that's one of the reasons we started this podcast and continue to do it. That's a lofty ideal. Because wanting to help people is something that lots of people say they want to do, but very few of them actually do it.

M: So lofty something of a high moral standard. So like lofty ideals. ,

R: Lofty ideals, things like freedom, support. Scotland freedom.

M: Scotland, yes, freedom.

R: Freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom from corruption, all things that you enjoy in Russia.

M: People at work can support you in the pursuit of your goals. This is a very specific collocation about goals because we pursue our goals.

R: Yeah. You chase your dreams, pursue your goals.

M: Right. Really specific collocation, dear listener. We chase our dreams, we pursue our goals. And then the noun the pursuit of our goals.

R: What goals do you pursue?

M: Money and fame. Shoes.

R: Shoes. I knew you were gonna say shoes.

M: So like I'm, you know, I'm a horrible person. So I just care only for money. No, that's not true. I want to be helpful

R: If you cared only for money, there are other things that you could do with your time.

M: I know, I know. No, I want to be really helpful. And I know I want to write the book.

R: Really?

M: Yes.

R: Oh, God.

M: No, I actually,I found out about my aim in life. I want to give the world quality IELTS. And I want to give quality IELTS teaching to IELTS teachers. Yeah, and because I'm not after money, I'm not going to be promoting my course for isles teachers. So this is me not promoting my super fabulous IELTS course for teaches.

R: I had an idea though, if you have a goal or an ambition of writing a book, what you could do is... Cuz I hit upon this the other day when I, when I was recording, I was trying to put together an article for, a series of articles to go with videos that we'd released for a teacher training course that I work on. And I recorded myself and I downloaded the transcript and I run it through a transcription software. And I got the transcript that way. And then I just edited the transcript to create an article, you could do that with your book. So you don't even have to write anything. You just record yourself speaking.

M: Nice. Cool.

R: Yeah. I'm gonna try and do that with with the book that I'm writing soon, hopefully, and see how it goes.

M: Wow, that's a good idea.

R: It is. It's like, so lazy.

M: So you see, you see, Rory helps me to move forward in my life, which is another good expression.

R: Which I used. Yes. You move forward or you accept the status quo, which is just another way of saying how things are.

M: Yeah. Yeah, like, maintain the status quo. So just like, maintain where you are, don't change anything. So we're happy with the status quo.

R: It's a name of a band.

M: Oh, really?

R: Status quo.

M: Status quo.

R: You don't know that?

M: No.

R: Vanya have you heard of Status quo. Yeah. See, Vanya knows.

M: I'm not cool.

R: What was that you didn't know yesterday?

M: I didn't know that there were moons and actually I asked people. I know about the moon, but I didn't know that there are many moons and just the moon is the name and there are different "sputniks" that planets have.

R: That must be a Russian thing.

M: Okay. Anyway, dear listener, we're not gonna go into Spain, okay, here. Drift through life together. So if Rory was what, dead meat. What do you say about dead weight? Let's imagine that Rory was a dead weight. And he wouldn't be helping me. He wouldn't help me to move forward but he would just drag me down.

R: I knew you're gonna say that. It's such a good expression. Dead weight dragging you down.

M: Yeah, dead weight like Rory isn't changing. He's not learning anything. He's just like, maintaining the status quo. So, and I also would be, let's imagine I'm, let's imagine I was like this. So together, two dead weights. We drift through life together. Like this.

R: Well, we wouldn't be dead weight for each other. We'd be dead weight for the people around.

M: People. Yeah. We would be dead weight for Vanya. Yeah. Vanya is moving forward. And we would be dead weight for Vanya.

R: Oh, poor Vanya.

M: Poor Vanya, yes. Scottish-Russian dead weight. Yeah. Anyway, yeah it's just like an example. Right. So drift through life together. That's a nice one. Drift.

R: Drift is a verb. And also I used the verb to fragment. Now, like, fragments are just parts of something that's been broken apart. But you can also talk about to fragment something which is the process of breaking things up. Like if you drop a glass, then it will fragment everywhere. But you can also fragment your society if you don't share common values.

M: Nice.

R: Thank you very much for listening! Send us your questions on Telegram or Instagram or directly on Patreon. Of course, if you have any, and if you don't, don't worry, we'll see you next week. Bye bye!

M: Bye!

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