You're listening to a special archive presentation of TED Talks Daily. This talk features historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, recorded live at TED 2008.

So indeed, I have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive, waking up with Abraham Lincoln in the morning, thinking

of Franklin Roosevelt when I went to bed at night. But when I try and think about what I've

learned about the meaning in life, my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was

a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Eric Erickson. He taught us that the richest

and fullest lives

attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms,

work, love, and play,

and that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the others

is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age,

whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication

is to make possible a life

filled not only with achievement but with serenity. So since I tell stories, let me look back

on the lives of two of the presidents I've studied to illustrate this point, Abraham Lincoln

and Lyndon Johnson. As for that first spear of work, I think what Abraham Lincoln's life suggests is that fierce

ambition is a good thing. He had a huge ambition, but it wasn't simply for office or power or

celebrity or fame. What it was for is to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he

could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it.

Even as a child, it seemed, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams.

He somehow had to escape that hard scrabble farm from which he was born.

No schooling was possible for him except a few weeks here, a few weeks there, but he read books in every spare

moment he could find. It was said when he got a copy of the King James Bible or Asop's

...