Ambition: How we manage success and failure throughout our lives (1992)

It looks like this is a web page that then loads a PDF from https://ambition.gratis/ambition.pdf -- to what end I'm not sure, though it did screw with my trying to directly save it into a "read offline later" folder.

hi austin, OP here (new acct because i noprocast'd myself but wanted to respond).

this book was written by my grandfather, with his macarthur genius grant, over 20 years ago. he gave copies of it to our whole family for christmas (he had done this once before, 20 years ago, but we were too young for it then).

i have dual motivations here -- i want to share the book with the world, and i also want my grandfather, whose condition is deteriorating, to have a little more joy in his old age. i sent him the google analytics from the site today (he has an HP E-print in his house) and he almost cried. i will likely write more about the process of converting his book, both from a personal and a technical perspective, but i just wanted to get something out there sooner rather than later, and the kindle publishing will take a month or two as the OCR was not so great from the scan so we are retyping the novel.

when i read it, i found the writing to be timeless, and wanted to share it with a larger audience (it was popular in its heyday, and i believe it could be popular now). i am in the process of converting the book to kindle format, which is a nuisance because we have lost the original manuscript. as the first step, i scanned the book (1dollarscan FTW). my grandfather desires the book to reach a wider audience as well, so with his permission, i published the scan.

> into a "read offline later" folder.

I have a "pretend you will read offline later but never actually read" folder.

Looks like a very interesting book, particularly for those of us who are struggling with the fact that we'll never be the success we once thought we would. Thanks!

For everyone else, check out the prologue; it's short and a good read.

Same here, though I find that it still helps a lot with procrastination. Separating the process of discovering content and actually consuming it means I'll only lose 10 minutes instead of getting sucked in for an hour because I'm too afraid to close the tab.

I actually got through a nice chunk of my read offline folder during a long car trip recently, but that only justified this hoarding tendency!