Which matters more to success - ambition or talent?

The FT Weekend Magazine has a regular feature called “Inventory”, in which questions are posed to a range of famous people from many walks of life. The questions are the same each week and one of them is:

                            Ambition or talent: which matters more to success?

When reading the responses, it is difficult not to be introspective and I have no idea how I would answer, should the question be put to me.

The starting point in providing an answer depends on the word “success”. As the people interviewed by the FT Weekend Magazine are well-known in their fields, they must have been successful. Many strive for success to make them famous, while others have little interest in fame. Of course, almost everyone likes recognition for their abilities and what they have achieved, whether in a career or on a personal level. So, is ambition or talent more important in achieving success?

For me, being an Emeritus Professor at UCL is a mark of success, but how was this achieved? It was certainly not a target and, indeed, my PhD research supervisor told me that he thought that I lacked ambition. He was right, in that I didn’t have goals, although I knew that I wanted to follow a career in natural history and the best way of doing so was to become a university teacher. That would allow me to carry out research on whatever fascinated me at the time and it would also enable me to pass on my enthusiasm for the natural world to students.

That’s where luck comes into it. Armed with good references about my work as a postgraduate demonstrator in practical classes and field courses, I was lucky enough to gain a 3-year teaching position at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, followed by a permanent post at Goldsmiths’ College, and then a transfer to UCL. Research progressed from a continuation of my rather dull PhD studies, through the inspiration provided by wonderful colleagues in the UK, Sweden and the USA, to a fascination with how all aquatic ecosystems work. That led to questions that I was quite incapable of answering and, as a result, I stopped practical research and started to write reviews that crossed conventional boundaries. That was valuable for teaching, but I remained a child-like natural historian at heart and it was the wonder of Nature – from chemicals up to large organisms – that drove my approach.

Having established that I had little ambition, did I have talent? The origins of my fascination with natural history have been described in “Walking with Gosse” [1], but talents are difficult to define. That makes answering the question posed even more problematic.

Moving further down the questions in the FT Weekend magazine “Inventory” comes:

                   If your 20-year-old self could see you now, what would he/she think?

I can certainly say that I would have been amazed that I ended up in my present position. If you told the person in the photograph below that they would become a Professor at a World-renowned university, give talks in the National Gallery in London, write books and reviews, and be awarded a higher doctorate, they would certainly not have believed you. How did it all happen? It’s a question we all ask in advancing years. 

[1] Roger S. Wotton (2020) Walking with Gosse, e-book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Walking-Gosse-Roger-S-Wotton-ebook/dp/B08HMCJS9J