The Achievement Habit Read Online Free Page A

course in the sequence, with another professor, and earned an A+. And guess what? No one noticed that either.
    In life, typically, the only one keeping a scorecard of your successes and failures is you, and there are ample opportunities to learn the lessons you need to learn, even if you didn’t get it right the first—or fifth—time.
LEARNING FROM BETRAYAL
    During a workshop I ran in Bulgaria during the Cold War, I showed a videotape of some student robotics projects to the group. We broke for lunch, and when I asked for my tape back, I was told it had been locked away for safekeeping and that they were tracking down the person who had mistakenly left with the key.
    The story seemed a little odd to me. Later in the afternoon I mentioned this to one of my friends who was also in the workshop. He told me in confidence that the delay was because a professor and his assistants—people I knew as friends—had taken my tape elsewhere to have it copied. Eventually my tape was returned, and they stuck with their original story about the reason for the delay. What nerve! I was hurt and angry that they had betrayed me and violated our friendship.
    When I gave my second talk at the workshop, I spoke about scientific interchanges fostering friendship and trust. While doing this, I looked pointedly at the perpetrators. I was sure they understood that I knew what they had done and was slyly reprimanding them—still I wasn’t satisfied. Upset, I went off into the woods to sulk by myself, thinking I would show them how wrong they were. I would leave early, skipping the gala closing banquet.
    As I walked in the woods, I kept festering. Eventually, my “nothing has any meaning” exercise came to mind. I ran through the events of the day in my head, listing off each item and repeating that it had no meaning. When I got to “This tape has no meaning,” a light bulb came on in my head. It could not have been truer. There was absolutely nothing on that tape of any special value to me or to them. What were they planning to do with it? I still don’t know. Give it to their intelligence agency?Show it to their students? Watch to get ideas for projects? I had already shown the tape; there was nothing private or groundbreaking on it. If they had asked, I would gladly have let them copy it, so what was the big deal? I had given the tape a meaning it did not really possess.
    They should have asked, and they didn’t. Big deal. Why was I about to let this ruin my night? Once I cleared my head, I returned to the hotel and ended up having a wonderful time at the banquet that evening.
    This incident was a vivid reminder that while I cannot control what the outside world does, I can determine my own experience. Once you accept that you give everything in your life its meaning, you feel like the master of your life, not a powerless victim of circumstance and chance.
MODIFIED RADICAL
    When my friend Ann got breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, she wrote “Modified Radical,” a lengthy poem about her experience that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and later incorporated into a booklet she titled Modified Radical and Other Cancer Poems . The American Cancer Society distributed the booklet as a patient education tool, and it became a source of comfort and inspiration for many people. Ann received letters from readers telling her how much her poem had helped them. One very moving letter came from a surgeon telling her that even though he had performed many mastectomies, and his wife had undergone one, he had not deeply grasped the psychological aspects of the experience until he read Ann’s poems. That was when I first noticed that Ann has the knack of turning personal adversity into positive experiences for herself and those around her.
    A few years later Julian, Ann’s fifty-nine-year-old husband, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was able to care for Julian at home for the first few years. Eventually, though,