Marcus Aurelius's Ambition Research Paper

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Marcus Aurelius, one of the Five Good Emperors of Rome, once said,“A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions". But what is ambition, such that it defines one’s worth? Ambition is the strong desire to achieve something, to get to a certain point, to accomplish a goal. Achieving an ambition requires determination and hard work. One must be persistent, even when things get tough. Next, they must be willing to forego certain pleasures in order to devote their efforts towards their goal. Lastly, they must be entirely passionate about their aim. It is impossible to happily and successfully reach a goal if you are not passionate about it. Reaching an ambition is no easy feat. Yet, as we continue, you will hear more about what it takes to …show more content…

Curie was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland. When she was 10 years old, her mother died, leaving her father to care for five children. She began attending a boarding school and later moved to a selective school for academically proficient children. At 15, Curie graduated high school as a top student with a keen interest in science. However, her father was too poor to support her ambition to go to a university, and further education for girls was not permitted in Poland. So, at the age of 21, she became a governess and began to tutor to financially support her sister, Bronya, who went to study medicine in Paris. She taught herself chemistry, physics, and mathematics by reading textbooks, and when she had time, attended labs and lectures at a free Polish university. She said,”Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be …show more content…

In 1891, when she was 24, Curie went to study chemistry, mathematics, and physics at the Sorbonne, Paris’s best university. She rented an unheated apartment with the purpose of living closer to the university, which made for quite unpleasant winters. She graduated at the top of her class with a master’s degree in physics at the age of 26 and received a master’s degree in chemistry one year later. At one point, Curie became interested in the rays given off by uranium, a powerful element discovered by Henri Becquerel. She wondered if other minerals also gave off these rays, and not just ones containing uranium. Suspecting that something even stronger than uranium was present in pitchblende (a mineral now known as uraninite), she and her husband bought a wooden shack in a schoolyard and began conducting research. For three years and nine months, they processed bucketfuls of pitchblende until they had enough radium and polonium to show the world the existence of these two powerful new elements. She described her experiences as the following: “Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself. I would be broken with fatigue at the day's end. Other days, on the contrary, the work would be a most minute and delicate fractional crystallization, in the effort to concentrate the

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