How to Better Yourself

Many individuals are not motivated to complete difficult tasks and do not take the time to make sacrifices due to a lack of connection with others inside of a network. Sameer Bhatia was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur that was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia. Since there were a few people within his South Asian ethnicity in the national bone marrow database, Bhatia’s business partner sent out a mass email to his hundreds of acquaintances to explain Sameer’s story. His connections forwarded the email to many others and next thing you know, Facebook pages and YouTube videos were dedicated to the Help Sameer Program. “Donating bone marrow isn’t a trivial matter. But it doesn’t involve financial or personal risk; it doesn’t mean spending a summer being chased by arm men in pickup trucks. It doesn’t require that you confront socially entrenched norms and practices. In fact, it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgement and praise” (Gladwell 138). He explains that activism during the civil rights movement was very dangerous and individuals stood up for what they believed in. In the present time, many adults do not take risks and they are not motivated to make an impact on what they feel strongly about. Technology has affected the way that users have been able to deal with situations and not put them aside because of being too busy. Gopnik talks about his friend that lives across the Park from him. He e-mails his friend occasionally, but never gets to see him that often. This invisible friend has become Charlie Ravioli to him and feels that both of them miss each other very much. “The crowding of our space has been reinforced by a crowding of our time, and the only way to build structures of perpetual deferral: I’ll see you next week, let’s talk soon. We build rhetorical baffles around our lives to keep the crowding out, only to find that we have let nobody we love in” (Gopnik 158). He feels that adults need to deal with the problems in a...