stories on Achievement

During the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Japanese gymnast Shun Fujimoto broke his right knee while competing in the floor exercise. At the time, Japan and the Soviet Union fielded the world's ...

If you were to travel back in time to the city of Rome (either during the Republic or the Empire), you may have had the opportunity to witness the Triumph, a colossal spectacle in which the greatest m...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

Until recently, most Americans didn’t know that women were pivotal to the NASA space program as far back as the 1950s. Their names and accomplishments were lost to the common history we grew up studyi...

Teams with a vision also perform better. Abraham Maslow is well known as one of the most significant psychologists of the last century. His research into high-performing teams found that the most stri...

When Bob Dylan was recording Blood on the Tracks – possibly the single greatest album in popular music history – he had to deal with a junior recording engineer who “explained” to him that he was goin...

Months of struggle, of strategy, of sacrifice all paid off in a landslide victory for President Richard Nixon in 1972. On election night his aide Charles Colson was in the place he had always wanted t...

The Double Helix, James Watson’s 1968 memoir about discovering the structure of DNA, describes the roller coaster of emotions he and Francis Crick experienced through the progress and setbacks of the ...

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

After finishing a major project, have you ever stood back, taken in what you have accomplished, and said to yourself, “That’s pretty good”? I’ll admit that I have on numerous occasions, especially aft...

Some years ago an army sharpshooter was visiting a small town. He was surprised to find bull’s-eyes with bullet holes in the exact center all throughout the village. “Someone or some one’s here must b...

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...

The British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory became famous after multiple expeditions on Mount Everest. On a book tour in the U.S. in 1923, people would regularly ask him the question, “why did you wa...

Brett Favre was a driven man. He explained to USA Today that his father’s message that he was never good enough drove him to become one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history…His dad had also been hi...

The Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst once offered columnist Arthur Brisbane a six-month vacation with full pay as a reward for his dedicated and successful work. Brisbane ultimately turned dow...

Not long before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to the congregation at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church: If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. An...

When Julius Caesar returned to Rome after many years of fighting its battles abroad, he planned great festivities and triumphal processions to celebrate his victories over Gaul, Egypt, Pontos, and Afr...