The Sean McDowell Show - Ambition's Hidden Danger: Miroslav Volf Explains

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Ambition drives success today, but is it also destroying our souls? Today, theologian and author Dr. Miroslav Volf Joins me in person to discuss his new book The Cost of Ambition. We explore the deeper spiritual cost of our culture’s obsession with striving, comparison, and being better than others. This book truly led me to reflect on my own life and striving for ambition. It is one of the most important books I have read in awhile. READ: The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse by Miroslav Volf (https://amzn.to/3ToRb3V)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Bition in itself is costly and negative. One of the elements, there is a kind of loss of objective standards. The more we are competing and comparing, the worse the situation becomes for us because we can find no comfort is connected with the loss of kind of religious frame. Miroslav Volf is one of the leading public theologians of our day. He is a professor at Yale University and the author of a new book, The Cost of Ambition. Dr. Volf, it's a treat to have you on. I read a lot of books and I'll tell you not only was your book interesting, but it was

also personally convicting on multiple levels. And we're going to get into that. I'm guessing that's a little bit of your motivation is to change the way people think and ultimately shape the way they live. But I'm really curious. Why did you write this book now? That's a very good question.

First, thank you for having me on your show. Sure. And mostly I write books that move me, that I'm interested in myself, and that could be books about which topics about which I'm excited, or it can be kinds of books that wag their fingers like me. And this is one of those finger-wagging books that I observed certain tendencies in myself, but then I recognized that these are not just my individual peculiarities, that these are features actually of the broader culture in which we live. And that was enough of a motivation for me to write it. And it was connected also partly

with some lectures that I have delivered. It was preparation for these lectures in a small way. So is this something that's been in the back of your mind for your life? You've just thought about comparing myself with others, ambition, or is there an experience that just hates you that's like, man, I've got to write something on ambition because this is something that maybe God's put on my heart or something like that. Like what precipitated it? So I think it was observation mainly of our Yale students. Students who are very bright, they have already Yale because they've been at the top of their high schools,

and they come to Yale and then suddenly they become one of the 5,000 equally gifted, presumably equally gifted students and they're lost. What gave purpose in their life, what gave kind of the pride to their life was that they were at the top. They're better than anybody else around them, than most people around them, they come and they lose that sense and then question is, who am I? How do I cope with this? Where do I stand? And it dawned on me then that in many ways they don't have some kind of objective standpoint or stand where they can stand and say irrespective

of where the other person is, this is who I am and this is a good thing and I can celebrate that. And then I was invited to do a lecture for I think it was second Congress of Christians in Sports. And I thought, what am I gonna speak to these people I think it was second Congress of Christians in sports. And I thought, what am I going to speak to these people about? So why don't I undermine one of the basic structural elements of the practice in which they engage and so I spoke about striving for superiority and how the impact that it has a value that it has and of course it has huge

reputational value, huge monetary value obviously but my question was what's the human value of striving for superiority and actually of being superior? So that's how I got the ball rolling. It makes sense. Well, there's definitely a prophetic voice in this for our culture and I think for individuals. I could easily see somebody right now going, okay, Dr. Wolf, maybe in sports for the second people that compete there, maybe the 5,000 lucky students who get into Yale.

But you have a line in your book in which you say striving for superiority is everywhere. And when I read that and some of the examples that you gave, I can't unsee that now. Now I literally just see it everywhere in my life and in our culture. So maybe take it out of sports. That seems like an obvious place where people are striving for superiority. I literally just see it everywhere in my life and in our culture. So maybe take it out of sports. That seems like an obvious place where people are striving for superiority. We get it at Yale that it would be that way.

But how is it just around us, kind of the air we breathe in the American culture and beyond? Well, it's a sports from three years old. Fair enough. All the way above. And it's in education, not just at the level of Yale, but in most classrooms of most schools, the striving for superiority is present. More broadly, striving superiority is certainly a mark of the economic activity.

It's in political domains. Some of the most prominent examples of striving for superiority and boasting in superiority we find in the political domain. I think it's more in culture more generally and it's somehow seeped into hearts of most of us. I think one of the precipitating events was also, I travel quite a bit, so I go through O'Hare airport. As you know there are these stairs that you need to climb, escalators that go up and down, and moving walkways. And since I've come to, at one point, a decision that I, whenever I can, I absolutely will not use either moving walkways or escalators. I will walk.

So I find myself one day, I'm walking these 60 stairs up, and there's this mass of people going next to me, not at the faster speed than I am going, but nonetheless, they're there being carried up and I find myself thinking to myself, I'm a kind of little bit of a superior kind of human being because I'm burning my calories and they're burning fossil fuels and so there I go into this whole sense of how I'm better and I think I stop myself in the middle of the thing and say, and they're burning fossil fuels. And so there I go into this whole sense of how I'm better and I think I stop myself in the middle of the thing and say, what an insane thing for you to think.

You have no idea who these people are. You have no idea what made them go, most of them. And pretty soon, a year or so later, I got bad back and suddenly I was one of those. That's funny. I love that. But in some ways, it is there in neighborhoods, it is there in whatever we as human beings do.

And it has been with us for quite some time. I think what's different is that when I started thinking about this and maybe saying something, because I didn't feel that people were saying much about it, I looked for contemporary literature on the topic, and it's very hard to find anything. I had to look back to the 19th century, end of 19th century. I had to look back to the 17th century and 18th century and then find robust debates about that very issue.

That's interesting. It was a vital thing and people saw, even Adam Smith for instance, saw in it a kind of human excellence undermining vice. And you wouldn't expect that necessarily from somebody like Adam Smith. And so I thought, oh, it needs to be revived, that tradition. I need to mine it in part and I need to go, especially in the sources of the Christian tradition, Christian faith and the Bible, as well as some of the thinkers who thought along those lines. And we'll get into some of those Kierkegaard and Paul and of course Jesus,

but what you wrote at the beginning where you're walking in Chicago, I've been there so many times, I can picture that in my mind. And then you talk about, you know, a neighbor has a car that's maybe a little nicer. I started to think it's everywhere. I got nicer shoes than that person. I'm eating healthier than this person. I'm going to bed earlier or later than this person. It's ever present. It's all over the place.

Now, the point that you make is that you say just striving to be better than others is damaging to us and damaging to the world. So let's start with us. Yeah, yeah. How does that hurt me? How does that hurt you? How does that hurt individuals when they strive to be better than others? Well, so if you are in this business of striving for superiority, you are striving for superiority in comparison with others. And no matter at what point of that scale,

if there is some kind of a scale, from goat, greatest of all time, to the worst possible you are, mostly there is somebody above you and somebody below you. And striving for superiority is you're kind of clawing your way up to be better than somebody else. And while you're doing that, you have first inferiorized the person who is below you now. You have notched him down. But the thirst has not been satisfied, because there's somebody above you, and you are now continuing to go.

And now think of trajectory of your inner reflection about yourself. You kind of loathe yourself, and then you tap yourself on the shoulders, and you start again a little bit loathing yourself, and you tap yourself on the shoulders and you start again a little bit loathing yourself and again tapping yourself on the shoulders. What does that do to the sense of who we are? Who am I? Am I this loser, winner, loser, winner person or what am I? How do I get kind of sense of more stable core that isn't constantly undermined, not by somebody else, but by me?

I am, in a sense, inferiorizing myself, former self, right? So that I can never find what one might describe as a rest in where I am and with myself. What happens when I can't be at home with myself, when I'm always somewhere other than at home, I'm always one notch above the home that I inhabit? It seems to me that undermines a lot of our sense of It seems to me that undermines a lot of our sense of self-worth, that undermines a lot of our sense of well-being, of a kind of contentment. And contentment not in some kind of static way,

but contentment with, okay, this is who I am. I can look at myself in the mirror and say yes to myself. I think that fundamental yes to myself is so crucial to our lives and is so rarely said. That makes sense in terms of my sense of identity, my self-image, who I am, my ability to rest in who God created me to be as opposed to what people say about me, what I do, etc. Societally speaking, you gave the example of striving for superiority when it came to things like slavery, like people of a certain race, namely white people, thinking they're superior and hence just dehumanizing black people. One example, how else does striving for superiority affect society as a whole?

Well, if you think about effects of that, of the ambition, most people these days think about, oh, that stimulates progress in many domains. Our performance in sports, our performance in economy, our performance anywhere else is going to be better if you're competing with other people. I don't want to necessarily discard that that's completely false. There is some of that that actually happens. But at the same time, what happens if I'm consistently dissatisfied with clothes that I wear, with car that I drive, with friends that I might have? How about if I apply striving for superiority in the domain of my family relations, and then I compare my child to some other child, and I find my child wanting,

and my child feels that I find them wanting. A very extreme example of that. I don't know if your listeners have seen Adolescent, this Netflix series. Oh, maybe some have, yeah. This is very popular. At the very beginning, you discover that this very troubled adolescent boy in his childhood had a father father and father at the end is very morseful for what he has done. He had a father who wanted him to be this more sporty guy and he was a kid who liked

to draw the drawings. He would put them in playing soccer in the goal and he would squirm when the ball was coming at him and the kid could see that his father was displeased with what he was doing in the sense that he looked down on the kid. Had the kid been top scorer, the great soccer players, this would be fantastic. So you see how the effects of that are not just on me. The effects are on everybody who might help me make feel better about myself.

And you see that also in the fields of politics. You have everything has to be somehow redound to your own glory. And if it doesn't redound to your electability and to your glory, you kind of diss it. You kind of push it away, and it can have a devastating impact on others. So the title is The Cost of Ambition. Is your, clarify your argument for me, is your argument that ambition in itself is costly and negative or ambition done a certain way is costly and

negative? Is there a way to redeem ambition as you see it? That's a very good question and maybe the title isn't the happiest. But on the other hand, the key to the book lies in its subtitle, which is, you may want to read it. I'll read it for us. How striving to be better than others makes us worse. Yeah, so striving across striving is for me not problematic at all.

That's what the human beings are. And it's a good that we are that. What I find problematic is striving to be better than others. Again, I want to distinguish between being better than others and striving for some kind of excellence. So you might have in certain domains a benchmark. Great distinction. And you may say to yourself, this is what I want to achieve.

Maybe that benchmark is tailored to who you are, your gifts and capabilities. Maybe that's some kind of objective standard, whatever that might be. But now you have a goal that you have set that you find valuable, and you're striving to achieve that goal. I say that's absolutely fantastic. That's what we should do in so many domains in our lives. We should strive for certain kind of excellence. But when striving for excellence becomes striving to be better than others, that's where the problems come in. And better than others is suddenly decoupled from any objective worth. The worth is simply somebody who is better at something that I find important than I

am myself. Whether that is true value or not often becomes marginal. The important is the feeling that I'm better than somebody else, whatever that is. And if I can't be better than somebody else in this, I'll try to be in this, and then I pat myself on the shoulders, and then I devalue that in which that other person is better than I am

and up the thing in which I am better than they are. So that, and in many ways, that can skew also our own, not just our own self-image as we talked earlier, but it can actually work against our true betterment. Because if I try to imitate somebody else and be better in the domain in which they are good, it may not be my forte. My forte may lie in something else,

and therefore I might be better simply to forget about them where they are, and I will excel in something in which I'm strong and I'll be happy wherever I am in the domain in which they seem to be better than myself. Warren Buffett has made this part of his investment policy. He thinks that if you compete against somebody on somebody else's turf and on somebody else's turf and somebody else's domain where they are excelling, you may find yourself actually in a losing battle. You better find your niche and your thing and try to be better every day than you were

yesterday, which is in my book, striving for excellence rather than striving for superiority. So in some ways what defines good ambition from bad ambition might be how we define success. Is success being the best that I can be, being a better person as opposed to being better than somebody else? How I define success is going to shape how I assess myself, how I assess other people. And it seems like our culture defines success as like you said, the goat, the greatest of all time. Are you better than this person? And we rank one another.

But if we define success differently, then it seems the problem of striving and ambition fades away. Is that fair? Yeah, maybe it fades away. It might be if we succeed. If we succeed at it. It will fade away. And I think the difficulty that we

find in which we are in the more modern cultures is that increasingly objective standards of value have disappeared. So you don't have a common moral frame in which things, in which our agency takes place. And that was, I think, the first time I read about it was observation by Alan Ehrenberg in the book called Weeriness of the Self. And he's asking the question, it's a kind of cultural history of depression. And he's asking the question, why was in the mid-20 century, a kind of neurosis was signature malady, psychological malady.

And why in the late 20th century, beginning of 21st century, it is depression, the psychological, defining psychological malady. That's a great question. And so he writes this cultural history and I don't want to necessarily repeat, and neither can I remember his entire argument, but one of the elements is that there is a kind of loss of objective standards. And so standards that we have are always moving standards that are set by performance of others.

More we live now, I'm invoking another thinker, Byung-Chul Han, Korean philosopher who lives, I think, in Germany, writes these small books that are really worth, I find, worth reading. More we live in what he calls performance society, the more we are competing and comparing, and the worse the situation becomes for us because we can find no comfort in kind of resting in certain objective norms.

Now for myself, I think that even those objective norms, say moral norms or whatever other norms are, will in the end turn out problematic. You can see that in the biblical traditions where there is a God's moral law, and performance of that moral law can be the source of sense of superiority that I have over other people. Pharisee and publican, how do you pronounce that name? Publican in the biblical story. You have the Pharisees and you have the Sadducees and the Herodians. But there are two guys that came to pray. I can't pronounce the English word. Okay.

One is the Pharisee and one is the sinner. Oh, okay. Who is a public, public, publishing or whatever its name in English. Apologies for my limited vocabulary. And the one comes to God, Pharisee you God, for who I am and what I do. You have created and so forth, right? I'm paraphrasing. And the other one beats himself in the chest and asks for forgiveness of God. And Jesus then asks the question, which one of these goes away justified, forgiven? And obviously, the answer is not the self-righteous one. And sometimes you can think that self-righteousness can be worse than a pride in one's own performance.

And that's why you have it in biblical traditions. In Jesus, you have it also in Apostle Paul, kind of a heavy dose of critique of striving for superiority within the frame of moral order. It's only now become much more prevalent that striving, because performance feeds it. There are no other ways to compare oneself. What might be some of the reasons that somebody strives for superiority so much?

Cultural reasons, personal reasons. You don't get into this a ton in the book. You kind of hint at a few things that might motivate people, but what could be some of the core reasons why somebody would be so just committed to striving for superiority? Well, in many instances, it's monetarily advantageous in the society. In other instances, it is reputationally advantageous. You count as someone, if you're a messy, then every kid in Africa knows who you are and in the rest of the world as well. So clearly there are these advantages that we have, a kind of a bragging rights that we get by being superior.

And we thrive on the sense of being better than other people are. And so the question then for me becomes, there are such propensities that each one of us has. If we don't stack very well we feel dejected because our worth before other in eyes of the others is assessed and judged and how we stack. People go for the winner. The loser even if you're second people don't talk to you, right? Or let's say in competitions or immediately the microphone goes to the winner, right? So obviously there are many, many rewards that we have and our societies are such that this is there. And it is there

from the beginning. I think first story where we have striving for superiority or dejectedness because superiority that we had had been kind of erased by an act of God's judgment, God's assessment, is the story of Cain and Abel. And it must have been a really powerful sense of loss of the status of being superior when it results in first fratricide. We feel that in a very deep kind of visceral way, and it's not a very easy thing for us to tame a bit and I'm very conscious of being relatively modest in the way I formulate this because this is part of who we are and it doesn't make us very pretty if we give way to it fully. We do better when we try to engage in spiritual exercises in order to learn how to be more

humble. I appreciate that you drew out at the beginning of the book how much in the Bible it's just you see the striving for superiority like a golden thread that goes through the scriptures. It's in Cain and Abel, it's clearly in the story of Job, his friends seem superior to him. We can see it in the example of the apostles wanting to be superior to one another. It's in Revelation, we see it at the end, like just it's all over the place and we can't miss it. So in one sense, it's the oldest sin in the book.

We see it in Cain and Abel, you mentioned, one of the oldest, and yet it's more particularly prevalent today. Is that because of technology? Is that because of social media? What are the factors that you think make it that much more pressing in our cultural moment? I think it's also in a particular cultural moments we find ourselves today is certainly what you're describing social media or in general, we can now compare ourselves with

anyone anywhere. When you had a very small domain where you lived in the confines of a village, it's like in a family. You may struggle, but you pretty much come to realize, get to know the other people, come to realize who's superior, who's not, and you live with it and around it unless you are like Cain who just cannot stand, and there are more exceptions than the rule in some sense. Whereas that's no longer the case. Basically, the field is completely open, what Thomas Friedman used to call flat world,

which he praised, but that praise of a flat world whether it was flat or not in many ways It's at least it's I'm not sure but it's accessible You can see everywhere what's what's going on and therefore you compare yourself in a sense more and then we can organize many domains of our lives around competitive And then we can organize many domains of our lives around competitive endeavors. But politics is such, and we don't curtail it by limiting, say, time in which the competition for votes can take place. Some countries do. Economy is there. Sports have become a signature feature. Four votes can take place, some countries do.

Economy is there, sports have become a signature feature of life and defined culturally, defining. So education is organized in the same kind of a way and it's become, you start educating your kid before the kid was born in in some crazy sense right everything is being organized around this little a little thing to to progress and make sure that neighbors don't kid doesn't progress more no not quite that's bad of course do you think there's a connection between the growth of striving to be superior

and a secular worldview that doesn't ground human value intrinsically in what we are and who we are as opposed to what we do? Like, you think there's a connection between those two? And of course, I'm not saying all Christians have this right and secular people don't, but is there a worldview connection that makes this so present in this moment, you think? Yeah, I think in some ways there is, because also loss of these stable values is connected with the loss of the kind of religious frame in which to have those values. But also there is a kind of loss of not simply of valuing what we do, which would be a certain form of meritocracy,

right? But a lack of awareness that meritocracy or meritocratic striving can be equally not just problematic, but in many ways meritocratic striving can be based on illusion in the sense that I often ascribe merit to myself for things to which many other people have contributed a great deal. For instance, entrance into universities. It's on the basis of merit, especially if you're talking about schools that are highly competitive. And you can say, well, there should be on the basis of merit. But what counts as merit is certain performance on standardized tests or whatever other metric is being used. But now if you are a child of a very rich person, they might spend

ten million dollars on you from the day you were born to the day you take those tests, and you have merited acceptance into that university. And I say, well, wait a second, how's that merit of the kid? If so much has been invested, why are we making judgments simply on the performance, then some kind of standardized, without taking into account what makes that performance kind of possible. And equally, equally too, is if I simply ascribe to myself in any endeavor a certain value for what I have achieved, but I don't step back, and asked who is it that all contributed for that value to be instantiated,

for me to be better in some ways than somebody else? I'm basing my judgments on illusion that it is my dessert, that I deserve that, rather than on the reality that, oh, Jeans played quite a bit of a role, but then the parents who raised you, but then the school system where you were, and you can kind of start listing. And once you start listing, how far do I go? Just to my parents or further down? Interesting.

And once you start thinking of it this way, you realize that merit and description of oneself, the merit, might be problematic. I think Apostle Paul does that. It's amazing in this one passage that three rhetorical questions to debunk just this kind of mode of thinking, which is I thought absolutely extraordinary. Let's talk about some of the thinkers that you mentioned in your book. We won't go into depth. You talk about Milton and some others, but Kierkegaard shows up. What's maybe one or two takeaways that Kierkegaard makes that can help us think biblically and maybe theologically about ambition?

One of my favorite lines in Kierkegaard is when he talks about King Solomon. King Solomon is the the great king, the greatest of Israelite kings, great in wisdom, great in his endeavors, the wisest of all, is absolutely splendid as a king. He stands for the at the top, maybe with King David, but somehow there's something even more shinier about Solomon. And then Kierkegaard comments about the story that Jesus, or teaching about worry and about lilies in the field and how they do not worry and each one of them is clothed in clothes that are more beautiful than Solomon was, right? And then Kierkegaard kind of thinks about this and said, well, wait a second, lilies don't have any clothes. They are just lilies and they look very, very beautiful.

And they're more beautiful than Solomon in all his glory. That's the phrase. And then Kierkegaard says, well, wait a second. That means that he's a human being. A human being is more valuable and in some more beautiful than than a lily. Inference from that that he makes. Solomon is more glorious in his naked humanity than he is with all the royal regalia. I think this is absolutely splendid. Amazing. That's interesting. That's a good contrast way only only Kierkegaard, I think, could do it.

Now, let me push back for fun. Paul says in Romans 12-10 to outdo one another in showing honor. How does that fit in? Sounds like he's kind of, do better than one another, beat somebody in a sense, be superior by outperforming them and loving, elevating others. How does that fit into your thesis? Yeah, and so I deal with that, that text. And I think that what we have is,

what I would say is mistranslation. It's not to outdo another in a competition as it is lead the other. So take a lead in doing the good works rather than be better than others in doing good works. I think that's the correct translation of this verse. So show model for people what it means to show honor to those who our society might not show honor to is the call. He's not doing a comparison game between people in that. Be example in doing just that. Be example in doing just that.

So that rather than, oh, you should be, you just strive to be better than they, do it in such a way that you set the standard if you want, that you do better in a sense that you lead, but in the sense of the lead, not in the sense that you derive the value from being better, but that you have taken responsibility to do it as well as it can be done. Okay, so I imagine if people have stayed with us in this interview and conversation, at

this point, people are having a similar reaction that I had when I read it, which is a few moments I thought, wow, that kind of that hit home a little bit. I need to think about this and process this. How could somebody know if they are striving for superiority to be better than others rather than the kind of biblical ambition that you described to be a better person or to just do excellence. How could somebody really kind of, is it a matter of just praying? Is it reflecting? Is it thinking about it? Being honest themselves? How could somebody really come to a recognition that this might be something their life they need to work on?

How often does the phrase, I'm better, I do better. I look better. Maybe not the phrase, but the thought. How often does it does it appear? How often do comparisons appear? And I think even more how much do they matter? Because often comparisons would show up, right? Humans compare. And I think in some ways there's nothing wrong in comparing. It's just what one does with the results of comparison. To compare is just to live a human life in context of others. It's more what I do. Do I sense, am I dejected if I don't stack up?

Am I proud if I do? Do I think, or am I aware that there are alternative ways of thinking about who I am and how I relate to others? That would be for me a sufficient indicator. I think the difficult question, of course, is that it's so deeply ingrained in us. There are evolutionary reasons for it, other reasons as well, so that it can become obsessive struggle against it.

And I think we need to have a kind of sense of taking it seriously, but on the other hand, realizing that this is not simply easy matter of overcoming. Be also kind to oneself. I think it's always a good thing in just about all domains of life, a certain kind of kindness to oneself seems to me appropriate. And I think, of course it can make us lazy and we can fail to strive at all, but generally I find that it doesn't. Generally I think it encourages us,

elevates kindness toward ourselves, elevates the spirit, and we can actually perform better un-worried about how other people assess us, how we stack against them. Sometimes we're paralyzed because we can't paralyze in speaking, paralyze in doing whatever it is that we are doing because we aren't going to be as good as somebody else. It's not worth doing it because we aren't going to be as good as somebody else. It's not worth doing it, because we aren't going to be really good in this way. And we do ourselves harm, and that kindness then, if we have it,

can free us up to be who we are, and to contribute what we can, and to have a kind of joy in life that otherwise eludes us. In some ways, you may have answered my last question, is you write this in the conclusion, you have this section here that's like 24 principles against striving for superiority. And one of them says, word for word,

it wrote down, it says, we must give up striving for superiority. Now, it seems like given that you said it's embedded everywhere, arguably comes out of our sinful nature in some fashion, we're not even probably aware of the level of striving for superiority that's in our lives in different ways. How do we do that? Partly I want to go easier said than done. How do we practice this? What does it look like to become a person who doesn't strive for superiority over others? So I was just arguing that we should be kind toward ourselves and I seem not to have been kind to my readers. We must!

Fair enough. I think what should have been written there, what I had in mind and didn't quite put on the page, striving for superiority as a kind of ideal or as a principle according to which we act. I think that can be done. And that can be done very, very easily for us to realize striving for superiority is not simply a good. There are some good results from it, but it's not simply a good.

It's also an impediment. It's also a negative thing. and we need to rethink how it figures in the scale of values that we embrace. We shouldn't embrace striving for superiority. That's what I meant to say here. And then the question that you are raising, well, how does one do that? How do we struggle? And I think in that domain of actual practical implementation, I think we should be kind to ourselves. Aware? I think, again, we should be kind to ourselves

in all sorts of areas in which we are prone to not to do as we hope, as we strive, as we aspire to do. And I think that kind of kindness is not a cheap acquiescence to kind of mediocrity. To whatever I am, I just sit and float and nothing matters. I think if we think, if we assess ourselves, and if we love ourselves, only to the level to which we perform, if we measure our relation to ourselves, to our performance, and to our performance vis-a-vis others in particular.

We will have a difficulty and then if we don't strive for superiority, we might end up being just floaters around. But I think we shouldn't do that. I shouldn't judge myself on the basis of low performance, neither should I judge myself on the basis of high performance. Neither should I should not loathe myself if I don't perform. I should not praise myself and gloat if I perform really in a superior way. We should love ourself with the same love that God loves us, which is to say love that is agape,

I love you for who you are, says God to us. I love myself, I should love myself, I don't love myself that way often, but I should love myself. I don't love myself that way often, but I should love myself for who I am and not For how well I have performed now once we have this sense that our worth comes in this being affirmed by God For who we are as human beings once we understand as Kierkegaard put it in regard to Solomon, that naked Solomon is more glorious than splendidly clad Solomon. And that's possible only if our very being is appreciated and loved.

Once that happens, then we open up to the possibility of performing joyfully whatever it is that we are calling, whatever it is that we are called to do and to perform, irrespective how we stack against others. That's a great word for us to end on because it's the heart of your book that striving for superiority, in a sense, affects us from loving other people, loving God and being loved by God, which is where freedom comes in. And the solution to that, in a sense, is to just free ourselves from this striving to be better than others and just learn to rest in who God made us to be and his love for us.

Beautiful message. Thoroughly enjoy your book. Read it twice. I think I'm going to go back to it again just to have some of these ideas really sink in my mind. It's called The Cost of Ambition by Dr. Miroslav Volf. Thanks for taking the time to join me. It's great to talk to you.

It was wonderful.