Accomplishment vs. Achievement

A conversation with Adam Gopnik and thoughts on Steve Albini

May 12, 2024

Because for the most part I get to spend my time writing on subjects of deep interest to me, largely on my own terms, there’s very few writers whose careers I envy, but Adam Gopnik’s is one of them.

The source of my envy is found in the amazing array of projects with which he’s been involved. He’s curated an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He spent years in Paris, writing dispatches for The New Yorker, which later were collected in his classic, Paris to the Moon. He writes about food, he’s a lyricist and librettist. He makes an appearance in the film, Tár.

I wanted to talk to him because as I wrote in my review of his new book All That Happiness Is at the Chicago Tribune, his distinction between what it means to accomplish something, versus what it means to achieve something has been stuck in my head since I first read it.

In addition to All That Happiness Is, Gopnik also recently published The Real Work: On The Mystery of Mastery, where he immerses himself in a variety of activities, trying to uncover the processes that lead to…well…accomplishment.

He and I exchanged questions over the miracle that is the Internet.

John Warner: Your distinction between achievement and accomplishment is one of those moments of reading where a little click in your brain signals that a target has been struck, like I know this is true, but I haven’t necessarily articulated it to myself before, so I think we should start by helping the audience see how you distinguish between these two things.

Adam Gopnik: In my lexicon – which may be idiosyncratic but I think is also illuminating – “achievement”represents all the outer-directed, institutionally compelled things we do to advance our lives or those of our children. Getting grades, passing classes, pushing forward into select colleges. All of that. “Accomplishment” on the other hand, means for me all the inner-directed, self-selected tasks and joys we choose for ourselves. It can be anything from learning guitar chords or card tricks at the age of twelve to learning boxing or batik at the age of sixty-eight. Accomplishment of that kind provides for us the sense of absorption – of ‘the flow’ if you like – that is all that happiness is…and that then provides a kind of platform for everything else that we want to accomplish in life. The ‘secondary passions’ we pursue fuel, rather than impeding, our primary vocations.

JW: Your personal ur-moment of accomplishment came when you were young, holed up with a guitar in your room playing Beatles songs, something you say has been “a foundation for almost everything meaningful thing I’ve done in my life since.” It’s interesting to consider this moment. You are alone, performing for no one. (Not performing at all, really.) You’re doing something many many other people have done and will do. By your own admission, you’re not doing it particularly well. How can this hold so much meaning?

AG: I had no measure except myself – and my own entry into the music. When we are caught up in accomplishment , we escape the situation of monitoring ourselves only in relation to others, and are delighted – or discouraged – by our own progress as we experience it internally. That was true of learning guitar at twelve, and it’s still true, for me, of learning boxing at sixty: the happiness resides in incremental progress pursued through passionate perseverance.

JW: I feel like All That Happiness Is reads like an addendum to your previous book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery in which you spend time in close observation and even participation with a series of people who have specific expertise in things like magic, dance, boxing, as well as the more prosaic (a driving instructor). The focus of the book is on the how of the work these people do, and it seems as though it is the how that truly matters, not just in terms of what you call “mastery” in the book, but also our experience of happiness. I suppose I’m observing that the manner in which we go about the things we do in life seems to matter more than the explicit nature of the things themselves. Does that make sense?

AG: Yes, of course! Obviously, All That Happiness Is is a kind of codicil to The Real Work – with the inestimable virtue, I suspect, of being far shorter and therefore easier to read! And yes, the ‘moral’ is continuous: mastery resides not only at the top of the mountain, a special acquisition of those who climb Everest, but is widely disseminated throughout our whole civilization – there are more strong sax players than we can enumerate – and is, in a real sense, its own reward.

JW: I’ve been sort of haunted by a research survey produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education recently that said that nearly 3 in 5 young people age 18-25 say they “lacked meaning or purpose in life.” Essentially, they feel a profound sense of alienation from life itself, work, relationships, all of it. There’s been a lot of worry lately about teen depression, but this cohort, according to the survey, has rates of anxiety and depression roughly double that of teenagers. I think some of this is rooted in unfamiliarity with accomplishment. It’s clear you’ve had a life and career that has allowed you the space to take advantage of your talent and curiosity and drive to accomplish things that have doubled as achievements. I feel like I’ve had some similar opportunities. What are we doing wrong where generations of young people do not seem familiar with these possibilities.

AG: I always slightly mistrust surveys, since they invite, by their nature, unmediated responses. If you drilled down with those young people who claim to lack meaning or purpose, and asked them what they like, what they care about, what they most enjoy doing , I suspect that they would have answers as animated as any of our own. But certainly I think – it’s why I wrote this book– that we suffer, they suffer, from the tyranny of achievement. I mean by the overwhelming stress we place on passing tests, pushing forward, building ‘careers’ rather than lives. They sense the emptiness of this pursuit, but aren’t always offered an alternative in the pursuit of accomplishment. I hope this book in a tiny way will be a permission-giver. Do the thing you love most, and somehow meaning will come. I don’t mean to seem naive – of course, we need to have enough ambition to live well and make a living. But while that may be where the money in life resides – and we all need it – it isn’t where the meaning is.

JW: Because I’ve been working on my own book about writing in the ChatGPT era my brain reflexively turns to that no matter what I’ve been reading and your accomplishment/achievement distinction fits sort of perfectly. Generative AI makes it possible to achieve the completion of a piece of text without accomplishing anything related to writing. Do you think about these issues at all? Are they relevant to your work?

AG: Yes, I think about them all the time! I did a piece for The New Yorker about visual AI that had a larksome tone, but was struggling to make a serious point. The algorithms and equations that exist within AI aren’t neutral, but reflect biases and beliefs about what art is that are highly conditioned by history. Similarly, I did a little light research with verbal AI: I asked Chat GPT to write an essay on AI in the style of …Adam Gopnik. I must say that the program did a very good job of scouring the internet to mimic many of the tics and mannerisms in my writing. But it had no new point to make and, even at my most fatuous, I always seek a new point. For the moment, imitation, not innovation, is the end of AI. Will this change? Who can know…but I am more skeptical than many about the flood of AI washing away the humanities.

As I started to prepare this newsletter, the news that musician/recording engineer Steve Albini had passed away of a heart attack at the age of 61. As someone who lived in Chicago during the rise of artists like The Smashing Pumpkins, Liz Phair, Veruca Salt, Urge Overkill, and many other bands that never quite broke out of the local scene, Steve Albini was almost a myth. We knew he’d produced The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa and Nirvana’s Nevermind and countless other bands, and would play out frequently with his early 90’s band, Shellac.

Albini was not beloved by Chicago musicians or music fans at the time, casting disparaging remarks about most of those bands I listed above at one time or another. One would not say that he mellowed over time, except that as he aged it became clear that he understood some of his past actions and statements which were rooted in a sense of personal integrity did not come across that way to others, and he apologized for some of the hurt he caused.

Albini’s Electrical Audio studio was known for his strict analog approach to recording, and while others credited him with a “Steve Albini sound,” Albini always pooh-poohed this, calling himself an engineer, rather than a producer, and saying his job was simply to capture the music as it sounded in the room with as much fidelity as possible. (I recommend this podcast interview with former Tribune journalist Marc Caro for a deep dive into Albini’s philosophy of music and recording.)

Albini famously refused to be paid “points” as a producer on an band or artist’s record, eschewing literally millions of dollars in the process, but as he told Marc Mason on Maron’s podcast he could not justify such a thing morally, that to do so would be a corrupting force on the work he wanted to do, to perform and record music and musicians.

Albini lived a life of prioritizing accomplishment over achievement as he discussed in another podcast interview with Andy Richter. He worked a job as a photo retoucher, even after he had started engineering albums that are considered all-time classics. When I did some posts on BlueSky about the podcast, Albini replied with what I think is great advice for any person who wants a life making something.

Of his work, Albini said, “Success means I get to do it tomorrow.” Good words to live by.

Albini lived a life of great integrity spending his time on things that were interesting to him, helping others to achieve things they desired. His death is a real loss.

Pitchfork obituary of Steve Albini.

“Steve Albini was proof you can change.”

“Steve Albini Was an Icon of Punk-Rock Purity —but He Also Showed How You Could Evolve”

Some interesting Albini-related links from

Austin Kleon

’s newsletter this week.

And here’s Albini talking to Anthony Bourdain expressing a view of the problems of capitalism when applied to creative industries. A view I entirely endorse and is rather hard to refute, IMO.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune this week I write about Lydia Millet’s first foray into book-length nonfiction, a wonderful mix of meditation, consideration, and lament over what humans have done and continue to do to the planet and the creatures we share it with, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.

In other John Warner creates content news, at my

Engaged Education

newsletter I explained (as patiently as I can) why there is no such thing as a “science of writing.” At Inside Higher Ed I wondered why administrators at universities are taking advice about how to integrate generative AI into teaching and learning from a guy who dropped out of college at age 19.

Here’s some good news:

Benjamin Dreyer

, author of the delightful, Dreyer’s English is doing the newsletter thing.

Novelist and short story writer Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore in Florida, The Lynx.

Ben Stiller is going to play Norman Mailer in a movie.

Via McSweeney’s, and in honor of Mother’s Day, “What Your Favorite 90’s Band Says About the Kind of Bored Suburban Mom You Are Today” by Jared Bilski and Talia Argondezzi.

Recommendations

1. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
2. Don't Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen
3. White Fragility by Dr. Robin DiAngelo
4. The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene
5. God is a Black Woman by Christena Cleveland

Briana A. - Binghamton, NY

Recommendations for lists of nonfiction books are always tougher because interest in subject matter plays such an important role, and the subject matter covered by this list is very broad. I’m going to have to just go with a book that I think is good and interesting, A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us by Todd May.1

Request your recommendation here.

So what do you folks make of this distinction between accomplishment and achievement? Does it resonate? How hard is it to find a path where you can focus accomplishments. Could achieving lots of things be a form of accomplishment?

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