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Accomplishment, after all, is a fairly straightforward process. Sign up for an activity, push hard, focus, and move forward. You don’t necessarily have to develop depth, balance, insight or compassion to be accomplished. You don’t even really have to impact other people. Indeed, if you’re really focused on achieving personal goals, or a ton of things to make your resume or application look better, you’re likely to take less time to really give to the people around you.
Run straight into your shitstorm, my friends. Reject the impulse to think about work, rather than finishing it. And, open your heart to the remote possibility that any mythology of personal failure that involves messiahs periodically arriving to make everything “easy” for you might not really be helping your work or your mental health or your long-standing addiction to using tools solely to ship new excuses.
But the first part of the book, which focuses on high achievement (Bill Gates, Bill Joy, The Beatles, etc) is more compelling and unified than the second part. The reason I thought that the first couple of chapters would be useful in my course is this. That our success or otherwise is largely contingent on factors over which we have no control and therefore deserve no merit is a familiar premise in a great deal of political philosophy, and its truth is so obvious to me that I find it hard to do more than say it to students. What Gladwell does is a brilliant job (he's a story-teller, not a thinker) of elaborating the various environmental conditions that facilitate (or inhibit) the success of very talented and hardworking people. Using actual stories about actual people that the students have heard of (Gates, if not the Beatles) really helps (or so I conjecture) in getting the students to understand the point which I find obvious and they often find completely counter-intuitive.
How do you take advantage of the law of complementary accomplishments in your own student life? If most of the major items on it required a lot of independent effort, then you are probably wasting time. Consider, instead, focusing on just one thing. Push
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