Mskills

Dr. Brilliant vs. the Devil of Ambition

If baby boomers had their own Faust, he’d be Larry Brilliant, a man who’s found himself at the center of almost every defining moment of his generation. His biggest battle: taming the devil of ambition.
What happens when you’re the quintessential baby boomer? What happens when you’re raised according to the precepts of Dr. Spock? What happens when,every time you cry, you’re fed?
Here’s what happens: The devil of ambition starts raising you. You grow up impossibly demanding — and hating how demanding all of your fellow boomers are. You become ruthlessly competitive — and even more competitive about appearing noncompetitive. You aspire to be a superachiever — but you can’t appear to be an egomaniac, much less an asshole. You become ambitious.And you become even more ambitious about not being ambitious.
This is the story of an entire generation. It is the story of baby boomers raised on ambition and of a generation that is never happy with what it has. When everything comes too easily, all you want is more. Ambition is the longest unrequited love affair of boomers’ lives. It scrambles their brains, and leaves them empty and unfulfilled.No wonder boomers are reaching their forties and fifties and feeling as fried as the Colonel’s best.
This is the story of a man named “Brilliant.” Talk about a blessing and a curse. How would you like to live with a name like that? For starters, you would have to become nothing less than Dr. Brilliant, your generation’s answer to Dr. Faust. Then you would have to play a starring role in everygeneration-defining event in every decade from the 1960s forward.
You wouldn’t just go to Woodstock, you would star in the movie sequel. You wouldn’t just make a pilgrimage to India at the same time that Mia Farrow is being chased by a horny Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or at the same time that the Beatles are just an ashram away, learning to meditate and siphoning sitar music into Rubber Soul; you wouldfind your own yogi, a formidable guru who would send you on a mission to banish smallpox from India.
After spending a decade in India, you would find your way home, where you would invent the first — indeed the prototypical — online community, the WELL. You would try to get Zenny Baba Ram Dass to baby-sit your rambunctious kids. You would become the personal physician to Jerry Garcia, thequintessential 1960s icon. And still ambition would be an itch that you hadn’t scratched.
So, when you are 56, when all of your baby-boomer friends would be writing workplace exit strategies, you would take your first real job: dotcom CEO, of course. After 30 years of struggling to find God and your soul and the meaning of work, you would walk into the heart of the new economy, smack into the belly ofthe beast. Why? Because you know deep down that you won’t really kill off that itch of ambition. You won’t really be free of its nagging demands for more and more and more until you’ve gone one long round in the ring with Mephistopheles. You have to prove to yourself once and for all that even in the soulless world of Silicon Valley, a complete human being, an authentic leader, can survive.
Thisis the stuff of legend, the kind of confrontation that would be worthy of a work by Goethe or of an opera by Gounod: “The Soul Vs. The Devil of Ambition.” In the title role would be Dr. Larry Brilliant, his soul on the line in a contest for the soul of a generation.
To know your own soul — and maybe even to save it — it helps to understand Larry Brilliant’s.
Did Somebody Say “soul”?
LarryBrilliant steps out of the fancy dusk of Soho’s Mercer hotel, shouldering past media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his new Lolita wife, and the first thing that Brilliant says is, “Every day, I struggle with ambition. Every day, I try to understand the meaning of this line: ‘Live your life without ambition. But live as those who are ambitious.’
“On the surface, this ideal is preposterous,” Brilliant...