Achievement and Success | Custom PHD Thesis

How do you define achievement/success? What does it mean to achieve/succeed? What factors can determine achievement
or success?
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Paper 1 Assignment

This paper will be 5 pages long and include a Works Cited page. It should have quotes, academic writing, and use at
least 1-2 outside sources. Please use the Library databases for your material or Google Scholar For the paper
please use the following questions. There will be 3 parts to this paper:

How do you define achievement/success? What does it mean to achieve/succeed? What factors can determine achievement
or success?

What do you believe are the 3 most important character traits in a individual that wants to achieve or be
successful? Why are these qualities so important?

If an individual wanted to change their character (adding in successful character qualities or getting rid of
negative qualities) could this be done? Can people consciously change?

Requirements:
• You you will need to use these parts of the paper but you can focus on one section more than others or treat them
all equal.
• Please be careful to transition the parts so that your argument makes sense throughout the entire paper.
• 5 pages for final copy
• Works Cited page
• 3 sources (at least 1 from class reading)
• sources should support your arguments or definitions or help you answer the questions for the paper
• Academic writing and correctly formatted quotes and research citations
• Analysis and Response based paper – please do not summarize articles unless necessary for context
• Logical Introduction to your topic and a Conclusion that shows that you want to convince your reader to consider
something new, change their thinking, or support your ideas.
• Present Tense analysis
• Quotes should be correctly set up, formatted, cited, and have a comment or purpose for being in the paper. Please
make sure there are enough sources and quotes.

here is some reading
Introduction to The Social Animal by David Brooks (pp. vii-x)
This is the happiest story you’ve ever read. It’s about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling lives. They had
engrossing careers, earned the respect of their friends, and made important contributions to their neighborhood,
their country, and their world. And the odd thing was, they weren’t born geniuses. They did okay on the SAT and IQ
tests and that sort of thing, but they had no extraordinary physical or mental gifts. They were finelooking, but
they weren’t beautiful. They played tennis and hiked, but even in high school they weren’t star athletes, and
nobody would have picked them out at that young age and said they were destined for greatness in any sphere. Yet
they achieved this success, and everyone who met them sensed that they lived blessed lives. How did they do it?
They possessed what economists call noncognitive skills, which is the catchall category for hidden qualities that
can’t be easily counted or measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfillment. First, they had good
character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their
mistakes. They possessed enough confidence to take risks and enough integrity to live up to their commitments. They
tried to recognize their weaknesses, atone for their sins, and control their worst impulses. Just as important,
they had street smarts. They knew how to read people, situations, and ideas. You could put them in front of a
crowd, or bury them with a bunch of reports, and they could develop an intuitive feel for the landscape before
them—what could go together and what would never go together, what course would be fruitful and what would never be
fruitful. The skills a master seaman has to navigate the oceans, they had to navigate the world. Over the
centuries, zillions of books have been written about how to succeed. But these tales are usually told on the
surface level of life. They describe the colleges people get into, the professional skills they acquire, the
conscious decisions they make, and the tips and techniques they adopt to build connections and get ahead. These
books often focus on an outer definition of success, having to do with IQ, wealth, prestige, and worldly
accomplishments. This story is told one level down. This success story emphasizes the role of the inner mind— the
unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, character traits, and social
norms. This is the realm where character is formed and street smarts grow. We are living in the middle of a
revolution in consciousness. Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists,
economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human
flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking.
We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness. The unconscious parts of the
mind are not primitive vestiges that need to be conquered in order to make wise decisions. They are not dark
caverns of repressed sexual urges. Instead, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind— where most of
the decisions and many of the most impressive acts of thinking take place. These submerged processes are the
seedbeds of accomplishment. In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia
writes that the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any given moment. The most generous
estimate is that people can be consciously aware of forty of these. “Some researchers,” Wilson notes, “have gone so
far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an
illusion.” The conscious mind merely confabulates stories that try to make sense of what the unconscious mind is
doing of its own accord. Wilson and most of the researchers I’ll be talking about in this book do not go so far.
But they do believe that mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness organize our thinking, shape our
judgments, form our characters, and provide us with the skills we need in order to thrive. John Bargh of Yale
argues that just as Galileo “removed the earth from its privileged position at the center of the universe,” so this
intellectual revolution removes the conscious mind from its privileged place at the center of human behavior. This
story removes it from the center of everyday life. It points to a deeper way of flourishing and a different
definition of success. The empire of emotion This inner realm is illuminated by science, but it is not a dry,
mechanistic place. It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the
importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and
perception. If the outer mind highlights the power of the individual, the inner mind highlights the power of
relationships and the invisible bonds between people. If the outer mind hungers for status, money, and applause,
the inner mind hungers for harmony and connection— those moments when self- consciousness fades away and a person
is lost in a challenge, a cause, the love of another or the love of God. If the conscious mind is like a general
atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyzes things linearly and linguistically, the
unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant
flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain no distance from the environment around them, but
are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas. These scouts coat
things with emotional significance. They come across an old friend and send back a surge of affection. They descend
into a dark cave and send back a surge of fear. Contact with a beautiful landscape produces a feeling of sublime
elevation. Contact with a brilliant insight produces delight, while contact with unfairness produces righteous
anger. Each perception has its own flavor, texture, and force, and reactions loop around the mind in a stream of
sensations, impulses, judgments, and desires. These signals don’t control our lives, but they shape our
interpretation of the world and they guide us, like a spiritual GPS, as we chart our courses. If the general thinks
in data and speaks in prose, the scouts crystallize with emotion, and their work is best expressed in stories,
poetry, music, image, prayer, and myth. I am not a touchy- feely person, as my wife has been known to observe.
There is a great, though apocryphal, tale about an experiment in which middle- aged men were hooked up to a
brainscanning device and asked to watch a horror movie. Then they were hooked up and asked to describe their
feelings for their wives. The brain scans were the same— sheer terror during both activities. I know how that
feels. Nonetheless, if you ignore the surges of love and fear, loyalty and revulsion that course through us every
second of every day, you are ignoring the most essential realm. You are ignoring the processes that determine what
we want; how we perceive the world; what drives us forward; and what holds us back. And so I am going to tell you
about these two happy people from the perspective of this enchanted inner life.

My Goals for The Social Animal (Taken from the Introduction pp x-xvi)
I want to show you what this unconscious system looks like when it is flourishing, when the affections and
aversions that guide us every day have been properly nurtured, the emotions properly educated. Through a thousand
concrete examples, I am going to try to illustrate how the conscious and unconscious minds interact, how a wise
general can train and listen to the scouts. To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan from another context, the central
evolutionary truth is that the unconscious matters most. The central humanistic truth is that the conscious mind
can influence the unconscious. That the conscious mind can influence the unconscious…

The conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species. Unaware of what is going on deep down inside, the
conscious mind assigns itself the starring role. It gives itself credit for performing all sorts of tasks it
doesn’t really control. It creates views of the world that highlight those elements it can understand and ignores
the rest. As a result, we have become accustomed to a certain constricted way of describing our lives. Plato
believed that reason was the civilized part of the brain, and we would be happy so long as reason subdued the
primitive passions. Rationalist thinkers believed that logic was the acme of intelligence, and mankind was
liberated as reason conquered habit and superstition. In the nineteenth century, the conscious mind was represented
by the scientific Dr. Jekyll while the unconscious was the barbaric Mr. Hyde.

Many of these doctrines have faded, but people are still blind to the way unconscious affections and aversions
shape daily life. We still have admissions committees that judge people by IQ measures and not by practical
literacy. We still have academic fields that often treat human beings as rational utility-maximizing individuals.
Modern society has created a giant apparatus for the cultivation of the hard skills, while failing to develop the
moral and emotional faculties down below. Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops.
Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love
and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own. We are
good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions. We are good at
teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing
to say.

Over the past generations we have seen big policies yield disappointing results. Since 1983 we’ve reformed the
education system again and again, yet more than a quarter of high-school students drop out, even though all
rational incentives tell them not to. We’ve tried to close the gap between white and black achievement, but have
failed. We’ve spent a generation enrolling more young people in college without understanding why so many don’t
graduate. One could go on: We’ve tried feebly to reduce widening inequality. We’ve tried to boost economic
mobility. We’ve tried to stem the tide of children raised in single-parent homes. We’ve tried to reduce the
polarization that marks our politics. We’ve tried to ameliorate the boom-and-bust cycle of our economies. In recent
decades, the world has tried to export capitalism to Russia, plant democracy in the Middle East, and boost
development in Africa. And the results of these e??orts are mostly disappointing.

The failures have been marked by a single feature: Reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. Many of
these policies were based on the shallow social- science model of human behavior. Many of the policies were
proposed by wonks who are comfortable only with traits and correlations that can be measured and quantified. They
were passed through legislative committees that are as capable of speaking about the deep wellsprings of human
action as they are of speaking in ancient Aramaic. They were executed by officials that have only the most
superficial grasp of what is immovable and bent about human beings. So of course they failed. And they will
continue to fail unless the new knowledge about our true makeup is integrated more fully into the world of public
policy, unless the enchanted story is told along with the prosaic one.

To illustrate how the recent scientific findings play out in real life, I’ve created two major characters—Harold
and Erica. I use these characters to show how life actually develops. The story takes place perpetually in the
current moment, the early twenty-first century, because I want to describe different features of the way we live
now, but I trace their paths from birth to learning, friendship to love, work to wisdom, and then to old age. I use
them to describe how genes shape individual lives, how brain chemistry works in particular cases, how family
structure and cultural patterns can influence development in specific terms. In short, I use these characters to
bridge the gap between the sort of general patterns researchers describe and the individual experiences that are
the stuff of real life…Because when you look deeper into the unconscious, the separations between individuals begin
to get a little fuzzy. It becomes ever more obvious that the swirls that make up our own minds are shared swirls.
We become who we are in conjunction with other people becoming who they are.

We have inherited an image of ourselves as Homo sapiens, as thinking individuals separated from the other animals
because of our superior power of reason. This is mankind as Rodin’s thinker—chin on fist, cogitating alone and
deeply. In fact, we are separated from the other animals because we have phenomenal social skills that enable us to
teach, learn, sympathize, emote, and build cultures, institutions, and the complex mental scaffolding of
civilizations. Who are we? We are like spiritual Grand Central stations. We are junctions where millions of
sensations, emotions, and signals interpenetrate every second. We are communications interpenetrate every second.
We are communications centers, and through some process we are not close to understanding, we have the ability to
partially govern this traffic—to shift attention from one thing to another, to choose and commit. We become fully
ourselves only through the ever-richening interplay of our networks. We seek, more than anything else, to establish
deeper and more complete connections.

The Greeks used to say we suffer our way to wisdom. The essence of that wisdom is that below our awareness there
are viewpoints and emotions that help guide us as we wander through our lives. These viewpoints and emotions can
leap from friend to friend and lover to lover. The unconscious is not merely a dark, primitive zone of fear and
pain. It is also a place where spiritual states arise and dance from soul to soul. It collects the wisdom of the
ages. It contains the soul of the species. This book will not try to discern God’s role in all this. But if there
is a divine creativity, surely it is active in this inner soul-sphere, where brain matter produces emotion, where
love rewires the neurons.

The unconscious is impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable. It has its shortcomings. It needs
supervision. But it can be brilliant. It’s capable of processing blizzards of data and making daring creative
leaps. Most of all, it is also wonderfully gregarious. Your unconscious, that inner extrovert, wants you to reach
outward and connect. It wants you to achieve communion with work, friend, family, nation, and cause. Your
unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing. It longs
and pushes for love…of all the blessings that come with being alive, it is the most awesome gift.