Summary: Has Your Ambition Decreased Since Drinking is the ninth question of 20 in the Johns Hopkins series of videos to find out if you are an alcoholic… Ambition, Persistence, Drowning in a Pint of Guinness! Drink tends to lower ambition because while you’re drinking you can’t do anything else. I used to lose days out of my life because of drink. How the hell could I achieve anything when I couldn’t keep track of my own time? Ambitions take time to achieve, they also take persistence. A drunk is in short supply of both. The alcoholic belittles his own ambitions because he realizes that to reach them takes much effort and a strong mental attitude. He’ll go through hell and high water to get another drink but that’s where he will stop. My life with drink was going nowhere only down. At the end of it all, I would have asked myself what I had done with my life and would not have had an answer. Drink? “A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive. Having been alive, it won't be so hard in the end to lie down and rest.” Pearl Bailey How Ambition Can Remain While Hopes of Success Erode My ambition never decreased, just the distance I could reach. I would pare them down, cutting the corners off of my ambitions, telling myself that I'd be happy to settle for less and less. I'd make up all sorts of excuses, saying that life is not all about having things or getting things, it’s not really about learning and growing, wouldn't it be better just to relax my way through life, and sure isn't drinking a good way to get through life's troubles. I was denying the fact that drinking was causing all a life's troubles. The Reverse – The Increase of Ambition Since Stopping Drinking! Look at things the other way round. My ambition has increased tenfold since I've stopped drinking. I'm no longer making excuses for myself, I’ve returned to pushing at everything I do, I have the desire and the persistence to achieve anything I want, and I feel younger than I've felt in a long time because of it. What Has Running Ever Done For Me? An example of losing my ambition is with running. I ran for twenty minutes this morning, up from 15 minutes last Friday, and a huge leap from the 1.5 minutes that I could manage only a few short weeks ago. Last year, although I still had the ambition to get fit, I'd moved to this country to change my life after all, I had ruled out ever running again. I couldn't run. Alcohol was causing my joint to seize up. As soon as I lost any weight, I’d have a binge weekend, or maybe even a full week, and I’d be back to square one, only this time a bit more of my pride and self-worth had been chipped away. So instead of admitting that my alcohol abuse had to stop, I knew it in the back of my mind by the way, I lied to myself – time and time again! I told myself that I hated running, it was no good for anyone. Instead, to get the same sort of workout, I would walk for 3 hours five or six days a week. That's between 15 and 20 kilometres a day. It took a huge chunk out of my day, 3 hours running, taking a shower and getting something to eat, I’d start at 6am and wouldn’t start work until around 11am. But, I needed to do it! I didn't know it at the time, but it changed my way of thinking and put me onto a different track in my life. That's for another day though. The point is that I allowed drink to pare down the ambition to regularly run. My 80 year old uncle still runs, but I made any excuse why I couldn’t. Even to the extent of walking until my feet ached. This was the ninth post in the series of articles on the Johns Hopkins 20 questions which was designed for you to self-test and discover if you might have an alcohol problem. If you answer yes to this question and yes to some of the others in the test, you need to take a look at your drinking habits.
