When you cover politics as I do, you find yourself around a lot of highly ambitious people. I don’t mind it. In fact, I like ambitious people. They’re energetic, trying to achieve big things, taking a big bite out of life. Their burning drive gives them the stamina they need to pursue their dreams year after year, and stamina is a vastly undervalued superpower if you want to contribute something to the world.

But, of course, ambition is both a blessing and a curse. Ambitious people are also more likely to be ruthless, manipulative, status-obsessed and so focused on worldly success that they become hollow inside. “Macbeth” is a play about a man who becomes a slave to ambition — that insatiable, destructive beast — which hardens, isolates and destroys him.

So the million-dollar questions are: How can you marshal ambition’s energies without being consumed by its insatiable demands? How do you live a driven life, seeking to achieve great things, without becoming a jerk?

Some sages say: Don’t even try. You can’t control ambition, so you should renounce it. Die to self. Abandon selfish desires and offer the world a pure and selfless love. This advice is not as unrealistic as it may seem. I’ve known many people who live utterly generous lives — serving the poor and the weak with great love without clamoring for applause. Their lives are wondrous to behold.

Unfortunately, many of us, and I include myself here, can’t seem to achieve that. Sad to say, my altruistic desires alone are not powerful enough to drive me through the hard labor required to do anything of note. If I’m going to get through the arduous work of, say, writing a book, I need to put my egotistic desires at the service of my loftier desires. I start the book hoping it will be helpful to people, but to propel me to work on it for years, I also need my name on the cover and the ego-pleasing possibility that readers might think I’m clever. In other words, if I’m going to be really driven, I need to harness both selfless and selfish motivations. I don’t scorn mixed motives; I live by them. I think a lot of us live this way.

Abraham Lincoln is the patron saint for those of us who hope to live well even in the grip of ambition. Lincoln’s law partner reported that “his ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.” And yet one of Lincoln’s major speeches, the Lyceum Address of 1838, was about the danger of overweening ambition, and you get the impression he was very much worrying about his own.