What Other People Accomplished at Your Age
Posted on October 9, 2007 - Filed Under Offbeat News
While the title may seem daunting, or even frightening, it can also be inspirational and motivational. I guess depending on where you are in life, this can trigger a serious case of mid-life crisis (WHAT have I done with my life???) or inspire you to burn all bridges to follow after the dream you’ve always had (write a book, circumnavigate round the world, or even become a movie star).
In any case, this site (http://www.museumofconceptualart.com/accomplished/) allows you to enter your age, after which it will display all the accomplishments of famous people when they were your age. Can be quite sobering so use with caution. At my age, the great accomplishers were:
- Poet Robert Frost sold his farm and used the proceeds to move to England where he could devote himself primarily to writing, and that made all the difference.
- Dian Fossey became the first primatologist to be accepted by mountain gorillas in their natural environment.
- French physician Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec invented the stethoscope as a way to avoid having to place the physician’s ear to the female patient’s breast.
- Robert Fulton developed the steam boat.
- Physicist Georg Simon Ohm discovered Ohm’s Law.
- James Marshall discovered gold in California.
- Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon.
- Earl Vickers started the Clockworks Project, in which he kept a detailed record of what he was doing and thinking each time a random timer went off.
- Famous mathematician/songwriter Tom Lehrer recorded “An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer,” in which he commented that “By the time that Mozart was my age, he’d been dead three years.”
- Roz Savage rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving behind a marriage, a job, a home, and a little red sports car. This adventure was inspired by a writing exercise in which she wrote two versions of her obituary: one in which she had lived a conventional life, and another in which she had lived the life she wanted to have.
Pretty sobering.
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