Accomplishment vs. Achievement
Adam Gopnik, Writing, etc.
Good morning –
Whitney and I took our 13-month old son to New York City for his second ever flight trip this week. On the days leading up to our vacation, I became more and more anxious about the prospect of taking our son to the city – how would he get on with all the noise, population, tight quarters? I also began to lament why we hadn’t decided to take an actual vacation to someplace like Florida or Cabo. I kept saying I would have preferred an actual getaway, a place to relax, a place with heat and a pool. Whitney assured me he’d be alright out here and so would I – in our favorite city where we’d get to introduce Jarvis to some of our best friends in the world.
On Friday I saw R and S at their art-filled apartment on 5th Avenue. Despite only having met in person about ten times, R has traversed my experiences over the last few years shoulder-to-shoulder with me – he’s been a confidante and mentor as I’ve hopscotched various creative and professional pursuits. At one point he asked me how the weekly newsletter is going. I told him that I planned to write it while in New York and that many people respond to me, telling me that they enjoy it, forward it to friends, print it out and read it, etc. While I haven’t taken the Substack world by storm or earned any accolades, sitting down to write and publish each week has been an anchor to orient my days as other things in my life change week-to-week. Plus, I said, I’ve done it for about 18 months straight without missing a week.
While answering R’s question, I thought about an article I read the day before, titled “Sure, You Achieved, but What Did You Accomplish?” (The online version’s title is more specific and less provocative). The author Adam Gopnik relates his experience learning guitar as child; his words reminded me of my time to sit down and write:
“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.”
There’s a deep sense of satisfaction I get every Saturday morning after I complete my first draft of an essay. A priceless feeling that comes as a result of sitting down to write and share my thoughts and writing. However I still resist wanting to do it every week and often think: Am I really going to write again this week? That nagging sense comes from the fact that while I do get an inner sense of accomplishment, I haven’t “achieved” anything with my writing.
Thus is the crux of Gopnik’s essay:
“It seems suitable at this season, as the school year ends and graduates walk out into the world, most thinking hard about what they might do with their lives, to talk about a distinction that I first glimpsed in that room and in those chord patterns. It’s 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.”
Most times when I write, I’m not conscious of what I will write about beforehand. Once I begin, the world outside me quiets down and time moves differently, more still, less rushed and frantic. At this phase of my life, giving myself permission to have the structure of time to write with the freedom of letting myself write about whatever I want is a gift I need each week. I’m lucky that Whitney supports this time and space and watches and feeds our son so I can while away the morning on my computer; she could easily say to me: Do this another time – I don’t care that your brain is fresh in the morning, this is something you’re doing mostly for yourself – I need you to help out with our son.
Gopnik acknowledges some of the objections related to the privilege of getting to pursue accomplishments when achievements are often what enable a person to support themselves and their families:
“At some moment, all accomplishment, however self-directed, has to become professional, lucrative, real. We can’t play with cards or chords forever."
"Accomplishment is just the name people of good fortune give to things that they have the privilege of doing, which achievement has already put them in a place to pursue.”
Yet he bestows the necessity of making this time: “Pursuit of a resistant task, if persevered in stubbornly and passionately at any age, even if only for a short time, generates a kind of cognitive opiate that has no equivalent.”
Our son is crying. Whitney needs my help now. This isn’t my most thorough or well-thought out essay. But I wrote it. And I can live with it in its current state without needing to sit down and embellish it a bunch before I publish it.
Gopnik concludes, “The pursuit of accomplishment, what I call the real work, never ends and always surprises. 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.”
What’s something you’d like to accomplish without any direct ties to conventional achievement? What would surprise you if you gave it a try? Who in your life could support you to take this next step?
Until next time,
Matt
P.S. I’m adding episodes of my podcast/audiocast to Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Please have a listen!