Skip to main content

What did Gatsby do as a child to help himself become a success?

Gatsby's determination to better himself is made evident in the daily schedule he devised for himself, along with a list of the "general resolves." He wrote them on the last, blank page of a copy of Hopalong Cassidy as a boy, and Mr. Gatz shows this to Nick in chapter nine.The concept is likely inspired by Benjamin Franklin's pursuit of "moral perfection" as outlined in his autobiography; it, too, has a daily schedule and list of desired behaviors and qualities he called "virtues."


According to young Jimmy Gatz's daily schedule, he would rise at 6 a.m. to exercise for thirty minutes. He would study for an hour, work for eight hours, exercise for another thirty minutes, spend an hour working on "elocution" and "poise" and then study "needed inventions" for two hours before bed.


The "general resolves" include not wasting time, avoiding tobacco, bathing, reading, saving money, and being "better to parents."


In short, Gatsby developed goals and the discipline it takes to see them through.


Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more