The difference between greed and ambition is rarely cut-and-dry. More often than not, it’s a matter of perspective. While most people are capable of reciting a dictionary definition of each of these terms, very few can give iron-clad examples of each, much less widely-agreed upon examples. Rather, the terms exist on a continuum. While there may be extremes that are easy to tell apart, anything outside of those polar ends are often just a mess of grey.
Greed is a term that carries a negative connotation. We pay a lot of lip service to it as a society; our elected officials stand at a podium and denounce corporate greed, our kindergarten teachers tell our nation’s youth to not be greedy, many religions have passages that frown upon or outrightly forbid greedy behavior. However, we as a society are awful at putting a hard and quantifiable limit as to what greed is. This is understandable to a point, life is varied and complex, a formulaic answer does not work for such a contextual problem. However, that context is what seems to be missing from a lot of applications of the word.
On the other hand, ambition is a term with a positive ring to it. We similarly pay lip service to those who embody-or we think embody=the term. An NBA player diving out of bounds for a loose ball is called ambitious. So is a debt-laden 20-something picking up extra shifts, or a salesman pursuing new leads. Just like greed, this can be messy to quantify-nor should we attempt to do so. It is far too context dependent.
Take for example a company that has had explosive growth in their industry but wants to branch out and offer a completely new, unrelated product. Is that greedy or ambitious? Without providing any more context, we are left with only knee-jerk reactions to go off of. Red Bull is an example of one such company; fueled by their wildly successful energy drink profits, they diversified into action sports. Generally speaking, Red Bull is looked at positively for this, many would call them ambitious. However, the first sentence of this paragraph also applies to Amazon, who many loudly jeer for their greed. Both companies are large, stable market leaders. So why the difference?
Besides context, there is another reason these two terms are often unhelpful; it also dependent on the bias (unconscious or otherwise) of the person making the judgement. What one person views as greedy is just as easily called ambitious by another. Both Red Bull and Amazon wanted to diversify to ensure a steady boat during rough waters, and both acted to capture more market share while taking a level of risk that they could afford. Previous reputation seems to be the only difference between why Red Bull is ambitious and Amazon is greedy.
There is a well-known bias that has been studied by psychologists known as the halo effect. Essentially, it states that when someone views another person favorably, they start attributing several other positive traits to that person as well, almost to the point where they cannot objectively critique the one with the “halo” anymore. While this is speculation on my part, the halo effect must have played some part in why Red Bull has been able to avoid being labeled as greedy. One who would call Red Bull ambitious and call Amazon greedy for doing essentially the same thing is certainly going to label others in their life with these terms as well, often with just as little scrutiny. These terms are essentially all about perspective.
These terms lack criteria. Few people would call a cash-strapped 20-something picking up extra shifts as greedy for wanting to make more money, yet we are quick to demonize Elon Musk for acting in his best financial interest. When did someone’s starting point become the sole basis for what adjective (and hence how we view them) we use? We label day-traders on Wall Street as greedy but love to see a handyman sell a house that he bought low and renovated for a profit. The amount of manual labor involved in making a transaction happen is also a poor separator.
“But Dan, there you go with extremes again” a keen reader will inevitably confront me on. Fine, what about a 35-year-old who has a financial cushion decides to pick up extra shifts, is that greedy? Or is he ambitious and not resting on his laurels? What about a franchise restaurant owner that opens his fourth location? Is that greed or ambition? The point where ambitious becomes no longer acceptable is so poorly defined that the term almost loses all of it’s meaning; ask 10 different observers and you’ll likely get 11 different answers.
The term greed is largely a hollow one because even at the extreme examples, there is tangible benefit to the supposed greedy deeds. Many people love to criticize Jeff Bezos, however we keep buying products through (or increasingly, made by) Amazon. The taxes collected from the hypothetically 35-year-old’s overtime check serve a tangible benefit to all of us. Society would be in a much worse scenario if these people didn’t work towards their own financial benefit.
If you absolutely must use these hollow and unhelpful terms, then please be exceedingly clear in what you mean and why you feel that way. Otherwise, what you’re saying will basically mean nothing. Kim Scott, in her book Radical Candor, provides some helpful advice as well: label actions or situations with the adjectives, not people. “Dave did a greedy thing” has much more room for a constructive dialog than “Dave is greedy”. The former alludes to a series of questions where a coaching moment can occur, the latter nearly implies that Dave’s character is forever stained and Dave is beyond salvation (besides, who are we to judge Dave anyways?). Similarly, we need to be careful with the halo effect with using the ambitious. “Sarah has shown a lot of ambition with closing sales” is better than saying “Sarah is ambitious”; the latter induces the halo effect and could lead to a situation where we stop being objective with Sarah. We can get to a point one day where we can retire these almost-meaningless words entirely, it’ll just take a bit more scrutiny from all of us to make that happen.
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