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- Achievement Versus Accomplishment
Image credit: New York Times Millennium Images/Gallery Stock
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 fulfilment, the sense of happiness that rises uniquely from absorption in a thing outside ourselves.
In an op-ed piece in this week’s New York Times, Adam Gopnik wrote in defence of accomplishment and argued modern society’s obsession with achievement is misguided.
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.
In Singapore, where the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at age 12 is a national obsession, achievement is measured by how well a child does for this high stakes exam. Many kids in Singapore believe their PSLE score is the only measure of their self-worth. Youth suicide rate is alarmingly high, reaching a peak of 112 cases in 2021.
In an attempt to play down the importance of PSLE, the Ministry of Education (MOE) introduced the Direct School Admission scheme. Students can seek admission to certain secondary schools based on their talent in sports, Co-Curricular Activities (CCAs) and specific academic areas. In one fell swoop, MOE turned the pursuit of sports, arts, humanities etc into an achievement game. Kids no longer play football for the sake of it - exercise, team work, enjoyment - but for the sole purpose of using their place in their school’s football team to gain admission into a “better” secondary school. “Better” as measured by O-Level results, which determines whether they get into the “better” junior colleges, “better” as measured by A-Level results. You get the drift.
In contrast, giving young people the agency to pick their own pursuits and become good at something can help them find themselves. Last week I shared how Think Global School student Marily decided to pursue fashion instead of medicine (as she had originally intended) because of a sewing module she did.
Self-directed accomplishment, no matter how absurd it may look to outsiders or how partial it may be, can become a foundation of our sense of self and of our sense of possibility. Losing ourselves in an all-absorbing action, we become ourselves.
Barack Obama credits his three years as a community organiser for paving the way to the White House, calling it “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,” an education that he said was “seared into my brain.”
About a decade before he died, Steve Jobs shared the story of how a calligraphy class taught by a Trappist monk named Robert Palladino shaped his vision and largely influenced his life and legacy.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
Some of the most accomplished people in the world became great at their craft because they made the choice themselves and stuck at it without any extrinsic goals or rewards at stake. From musician Ryuichi Sakamoto (RIP) to winemaker Rafael Palacios, they picked their craft and kept honing it until they became great at it. Sometimes, their craft may not even be directly related to what they end up becoming known for (e.g. Steve Jobs and calligraphy), but therein lies the rub - the pursuit of accomplishment always surprises.
You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Exploring the Doyobi world and solving quests and challenges with other kids is an engulfing, all-absorbing activity where kids become themselves. Until recently, Doyobi was only available to kids in Asia. Today, our online community is worldwide, with class times that work for families in the US.
If you enjoyed this week’s issue, you may want to check out issue 55 of Education & Catastrophe ‘Visiting Athens With A Traveling High School’.
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Till the next issue!