Why Being Ambitious is Key to Innovation

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Very few entrepreneurs and artists succeed in bringing about groundbreaking and innovating practices or enterprises without having drive and ambition. Note I say ambition and not greed. (For whatever reason people lately seem to confuse these two terms although they aren’t interchangeable.)

The editor and cartoonist Frank Tyger said that “ambition is enthusiasm with a purpose”. The word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek root entheos which means “divinely inspired or possessed by God”. When we want something really bad, we find the divine perseverance and guidance to pursue our dreams with all we have.

That was what Mary Cassatt did in her lifetime: with integrity, skill, and unabashed ambition she became one of a relatively small number of American women to become a professional artist in the 19th century and a wildly successful one with an international career to boot.

A pioneer of advocating for equal rights in and outside the arts, Cassatt was known for her intimate and realistic depictions of women, especially mothers and children, which was a new subject matter in the art world at the time.

Do you remember The Three Little Pigs? A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses which are made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house that is made of bricks. Consider this the next time you think about taking a shortcut in your career.

Drive and ambition can only take you so far if your foundation isn’t strong enough. While it is absolutely fascinating to read the stories of artists who go from zero to a million in a matter of months, or of teenage entrepreneurs and twenty-somethings who built billion-dollar companies in a couple of years, we have also witnessed the strepitous collapse of those who didn’t have the knowledge to understand what they were doing.

Though her family objected to her becoming a professional artist, Cassatt began studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia at the early age of 15. She then moved to Paris in 1866, with her mother and family friends acting as chaperones where she studied privately with masters from the Ecole of Beaux Arts. She became an indefatigable student of art, spending hours in museums copying the old masters and also inventing her own thing.

In fact, Cassatt was so eager to build a solid foundation that she spent months traveling in Europe looking to deepen her knowledge of art: Madrid, Seville, Parma, Rome, The Hague and Antwerp were some of the places where she spent hours inside museums and in rented studios, pushing the boundaries of what already existed with her pictorial innovations.

It’s not that you need to know everything before you embark upon a new venture or while you continue forging your path, it is that a house made of bricks will render storms non-threatening and the normal ups and downs of any trajectory will be managed with much more ease.

Technology, access to education, increased opportunities, and an ability to absorb knowledge and learn fast always turn newer generations into superstars, as long as they have the willingness and desire to be excellent and to create something of meaning. In that sense, we do live in an extremely competitive world but on the other side of the equation, most people don’t really want to do what it takes to get there.

If there’s a word that describes Mary Cassat, it is “ambition.” In a letter to her son on July 23, 1891, Cassatt's mother commented: "Mary is at work again, intent on fame and money, she says....” Cassatt was also remembered for emphasizing that she always made money through the sale of her work. "I am independent! I can live alone, and I love to work."

She even made the radical decision to never get married, as it would interfere with her career. While I am not advocating for either/or situations, much less in the year 2023, Cassatt’s moves show the determination of what it means to have a burning desire to succeed in what you do. She wanted to make history, she wanted to break conventions, and she is often quoted as saying "I would rather make a good failure than a mediocre success."

It is estimated that Cassatt produced 2,000 paintings, pastels and prints in her lifetime, and her work has been celebrated for its beauty, emotional resonance, and technical skill. Besides, she was the only American considered an Impressionist and one who was admired by Edgar Degas, Camille Pisarro, Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot. Mary Cassatt was not a “woman painter,” American or French, modernist or ultimately conservative, so much as she became the leading “painter of modern women” in the 1900s.

Ambitious and independent people don’t accept things at face value. Neither did Cassatt, who in 1893 received an invitation to complete a massive project that women weren’t normally offered: to paint a giant mural close to the ceiling of a Chicago building to celebrate the World's Columbian Exposition.

Cassatt traveled Stateside to spend dozens of hours painting up a ladder to finish a 12-x-58-foot mural depicting a woman's right to determine their own meanings, collectively questioning the history, theology, and culture of patriarchy. Her painting “Young Women Plucking Fruit" was used as the cover image for the catalog.

The same year, Cassatt also had her first retrospective of over a hundred works in the galleries of Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris from November to December. There was absolutely no rule about success and women’s places in society that she wasn’t determined to disprove.

As the new century arrived, Cassatt served as an advisor to several major art collectors and stipulated that they eventually donate their purchases to American art museums. In recognition of her contributions to the arts, France awarded her the Légion d'honneur in 1904.

Cassatt’s legacy is vast. She’s considered to have had a significant influence on advertising, particularly in the early 20th century when her work became more widely known and popular. Advertisers were drawn to Cassatt's depictions of women and children, as well as her use of color and light, which helped to create an emotional connection with the viewer. One of the most famous examples of Cassatt's influence on advertising is the Gerber Baby, which was first introduced in 1928.

Virginia Woolf mentions Mary Cassatt in her 1929 essay “A Room of One's Own,” and in Louisa May Alcott's novel "Little Women," the character Amy March is particularly fascinated by Cassatt's work and aspires to be a painter like her. Alice Neel was influenced by Cassatt's portrayal of women and children. The color, textures, and patterns in the clothes that her women wore have said to have inspired some of Christian Dior, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Alexander McQueen’s runway collections.

She was one of the few female artists of her time to achieve international recognition, and she broke down barriers for women everywhere. She was an outspoken advocate for women's equality, campaigning with her friends for equal travel scholarships for students in the 1860s, and the right to vote in the 1910s. Cassatt was a master of capturing the nuances of human relationships and emotions in her art in ways that had never been done before. In the end, it’s safe to say that her ambition paid off.

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