The Road to Self-Renewal
TL;DR — Gardner’s short essay on staying alive intellectually after the external structure of achievement falls away.
Stanford Alumni Association, March 1994. John Gardner (‘33, MA ‘36) — Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, founder of Common Cause, and a lifelong student of how organisations and people go stale.
Five pages. The argument: renewal is not a young person’s problem. Most people stop learning around thirty, having acquired the competence their role requires, and the decline that follows is not biological but a failure to keep taking on things one is bad at.
One of the most-passed-along short essays in American public life, and it earns it.
Where this came from
5 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.