Rhetorical Analysis Of Bernard Roth's The Achievement Habit

If it is unobtainable, make it obtainable. If your goals are too difficult to reach, that's okay, just make them more manageable. If everything has been tried in order to achieve a certain goal but still no cigar, just devalue whatever it is and forget about it. In a nutshell, this is what Stanford professor Bernard Roth preaches in the first chapter of his book The Achievement Habit. In order to persuade his audience, Roth utilizes rhetorical appeals such as: logos, ethos, a and pathos, but does so rather ineffectually . Due to his gross infatuation with himself, Dr. Roth’s argument loses an extreme amount of credibility to any of his readers who can see past the fact that he is a Stanford professor and that he is just another guy with opinions

You know who else can do that—everyone! He sets up his entire argument in the first chapter banking on the fact that people will read and accept what he has to say simply because he established his ethos in the introductory by stating that he is a Stanford professor. On to Roth’s argument, he begins the first chapter of his book with the statement “Your life has no meaning.”(Roth 1). At first this may be a turnoff to a large majority of readers, but continuing on in the chapter, Roth attempts to explain his argument. After the use of this dramatic attention grabber, Dr. Roth elaborates and claims that people give everything it's own specific meaning. Appealing to the readers logic, he provides multiple stories that follow his claim. The first story that he provides is about a student named Mike that enrolled in his class and long story short, he did not pass. The student was required to complete a semester goal but was dramatically unsuccessful. Resulting from this was Dr. Roth forming a very negative opinion about Mike. He presumed that Mike was a slacking underachiever. Three years later he met Mike and found that he had accomplished much more than he ever thought he was

All of his evidence that he gives to support his claims are very specific instances in which his method of creating a false reality actually works. For instance, Roth provides an example in which he had something stolen from him and how he reacted to it. At first he explains how he was “hurt and angry that they had betrayed me and violated their friendship”(Roth 21). Roth was furious with the people who had stolen from him but yet he couldn’t do a thing about it. Instead of taking the time to have the issue resolved or struggled to find a solution, he just dropped it. He devalued the item that was stolen from him so that way he didn’t feel as bad that he had been wronged. This is one of his prime examples of how you can change the meaning of something simply by reducing the meaning. That's all fine and dandy to do if you are willing to roll over and let people walk all over you and do nothing about it. What happens when the problem is more severe the next time? What if someone were to assassinate the President of the United States and our government just pretended like it was not a big deal just because they couldn’t find the person responsible? Everyone needs to be held accountable for their actions otherwise there would be chaos. Roth’s method to approaching problems is for the weak-minded and for those who are to lazy to find a solution to a predicament. If Roth's problem solving method actually worked, this essay would not be