What are your most memorable accomplishments? Mastering a difficult song on the piano? Getting a driver’s license? Learning to knit a scarf, shoot a layup or perform a dazzling magic trick?
Reflect on your accomplishments, big and small: How many of them did you pursue on your own? How many were things that you wouldn’t have gone after without the prodding of your parents, teachers or other adults? Is one kind of accomplishment more fulfilling than the other?
In “What We Lose When We Push Our Kids to ‘Achieve’,” Adam Gopnik writes about the importance of self-directed accomplishment:
When I was 12, I disappeared into my bedroom with a $40 folk guitar and a giant book of Beatles songs, with elementary, large-type “E-Z” chord diagrams to follow. I had no musical gift, as a series of failed music lessons had assured me — it was actually the teachers who assured me; the lessons were merely dull — and no real musical training. My fingers stung as I tried to press down on the strings without making them buzz, and my left hand ached as I tried, and for a long time failed, stretching it across the neck. Nonetheless, I worked my way through “Rain” (abbreviated to two chords) and “Love Me Do” (three) and finally “Yellow Submarine” (four chords, or was it five?) and discovered by myself the matchless thrill of homemade musical harmony.
No one asked me to do this, and surely no one was sorry the door was closed as I strummed and stumbled along after the nirvana of these simplified songs. But the sense of happiness I felt that week — genuine happiness, rooted in absorption in something outside myself — has stayed with me.
Fifty years later, I am still not a very good guitar player, but that week’s work, and the months and years of self-directed practice on the instrument that followed it, became a touchstone of sorts for me and a model and foundation for almost every meaningful thing I’ve done since. It gave me confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished, that perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.
Mr. Gopnik explains the difference between achievement and accomplishment:
Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside — the reward often being a path to the next achievement. Accomplishment is the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.
Our social world often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement. All our observation tells us that young people, particularly, are perpetually being pushed toward the next test or the “best” grammar school, high school or college they can get into. We invent achievement tests designed to be completely immune to coaching, and therefore we have ever more expensive coaches to break the code of the noncoachable achievement test. (Those who can’t afford such luxuries are simply left out.) We drive these young people toward achievement, tasks that lead only to other tasks, into something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with another hit of sugar water awaiting around the bend but the path to the center — or the point of it all — never made plain.
The essay concludes:
The pursuit of accomplishment, what I call the real work, never ends and always surprises. I learned in that chord-building week so long ago that if you simply lifted one finger from the C chord, you got the most tender and poignant harmony. I didn’t know then that it was a major seventh chord, favorite of the bossa-nova masters, but I later learned that Paul McCartney, like me, didn’t know that’s what it was, either, when he first made the shape and referred to it simply as “the pretty chord.” From the most gifted to the least, we are brothers and sisters in the pursuit of accomplishment and our stubborn self-propelled decoding of its mysteries. That’s our real human achievement.
Students, read the entire article and then tell us:
What have you accomplished in your life? What accomplishments, big or small, do you feel most proud of, and why?
What do you think of Mr. Gopnik’s distinction between achievement (“the completion of the task imposed from outside”) and accomplishment (“the end point of an engulfing activity we’ve chosen, whose reward is the sudden rush of fulfillment”)? Is one kind of success more meaningful? Do you prefer projects and activities that are asked of you, or ones that you choose yourself?
Mr. Gopnik writes that the self-discoveries he made playing guitar gave him “confidence, often wavering but never entirely extinguished” and taught him that “perseverance and passion and patience can make one master any task.” What have your accomplishments given you? Have they taught you anything?
Mr. Gopnik asserts that our society “often conspires to denigrate accomplishment in favor of the rote work of achievement,” driving young people into “something resembling not so much a rat race as a rat maze.” Do you think our culture is fixated on achievement? If so, how has that preoccupation affected you, positively or negatively?
Did you find this essay inspiring? Will it encourage you to explore your own interests, regardless of external reward or validation, more fully? Why or why not? What projects, big or small, would you like to accomplish some day? If you had unlimited time and resources, what would you try to learn, create, invent or investigate?
