We push ourselves toward the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs, seeking promotions and public recognition. As Adam Gopnik points out, the result is not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with no way out. Except one: to choose accomplishment over achievement.
Achievement is the completion of the task imposed from outside.
Accomplishment, by contrast, is the end point of an engulfing activity one engages in for its own sake.
Shermer and Gopnik discuss:
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including Paris to the Moon and The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.
Sponor: brilliant.org/skeptic