Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrerspeakerpedia.com“I will get bored. I will get tired of looking at these words and crave a distraction. and so I will click away from this page and head somewhere else, amusing myself with a totally irrelevant website. After a few lovely minutes of wasted time, my feelings of guilt will grow and I will find my way back here, to this sentence”(Effort). Jonah wrote this in his article about the brain and effort, Jonah would know a lot of things about effort since he’s written four books and worked with many news stations for 15 years, ever since he graduated from the University of Columbia with two degrees in both Neurology and Literature. But Lehrer’s achievements are not why I am writing an essay about him, instead I am writing about him because he is a hardworking individual, a man full of diligence, a man who never gives up, and always knows what has to be done and does it.

Jonah With His Wifeprojectroomseattle.orgThe first reason Jonah Lehrer is my hero is because he's resilient, and can recover quickly from falling down or failing at something. In the article titled A Fraud? Jonah Lehrer Says His Remorse Is Real. Alexandra Alter says: “His publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, recalled two of his books, 'Imagine' and 'How We Decide.' His banishment from the profession seemed permanent. Now, as he tries a comeback with 'A Book About Love,' a new work of nonfiction that draws on social and psychological studies and examples from literature to explore the nature of love, Mr. Lehrer is facing fresh criticism, as well as support. Some are skeptical that he has changed”. This quote explains how Lehrer got his books recalled because they included copyright. Jonah, knowing he got his books taken down, he kept persevering and made a comeback in 2016 with his new book “A Book About Love”. Another Example of this is written in a biography of Jonah Lehrer: “After his fabrication scandal broke last summer, Lehrer says he searched for reasons -- any reasons -- to avoid blaming himself or taking responsibility. He linked a story of the FBI's devastatingly wrong findings in the Brandon Mayfield case to the confirmation biases in his own life. ‘If we are not prepared to deal with our mistakes, if we try to hide them away, then any error can become a catastrophe,’ he said.”(Arrogance). In this quote he says that failure is never failure, until you give up in succeeding then you have truly failed. He believes that until you give up, that nothing is failing, but only learning to succeed and that is why he made the new book with checking plagiarism making sure he didn’t make the same mistake before. Jonah Lehrer never gives up no matter how many times he will fail or make a mistake and he will keep going until he reaches success.

He is also diligent and will always keep working no matter what he faces in life. In the same article A Fraud… Alter says that “Mr. Lehrer refers to his 'mistakes and failures' and writes, 'I am ashamed of what I've done.' He describes the steps he took to ferret out errors and exaggerations in his new work. He hired an independent fact checker and sent sections of the book to his sources in advance of publication, allowing them to vet their quotations and his descriptions of their research. The book has 27 pages of footnotes”. He knows what he has done in his two books that got marked for copyright so he made another book and checked for plagiarism. He kept working on these books because if he stopped he would have finally failed; that shows that he has diligence. Another example is in an article by States News Service: “He vowed to continue to apologize. ‘Regardless of whether I ever write again, I need to reckon with what I did publicly. I couldn't imagine the story of what I tell my daughter one day that didn't include today, about standing up here and saying what I did wrong.’” In this Jonah Lehrer talks about how he will continue to apologize to the public, Lehrer also says that he would like to talk to his daughter not about success but about failure and having the vibe to keep working no matter what criticism you get. Jonah Lehrer always has diligence and will always keep working until he physically is unable to.

Jonah Lehrer: A Book About Lovegoodreads.com The final thing that Lehrer has is integrity and caring about his family and others while still getting his work done. His integrity shows in the article about him titled “Jonah Lehrer”: "’He proves himself an able curator of information (thankfully with plenty of attribution this time around),’ a Publishers Weekly critic remarked. Karen Springen, writing in Booklist, was also positive, and she found that Lehrer ‘presents a strong case for spending quality time with children and other loved ones.’”(Contemporary Authors Online). He loves spending time with his children and family, he has two kids, one boy and a girl and a wife. This is tremendously integrous of him because despite all the work he is doing he still finds time to spend with his family and others. In another article titled Mind Games Solomon says: “Your forthcoming book, ''How We Decide,'' is the latest entry in a growing field that might be called the science of decision-making. How do you explain the fascination with decisions? For the first time, neuroscience can be applied to everyday life. The research on the neurotransmitter dopamine, for instance, can teach us why we play slot machines and overuse our credit cards. Are you a decisive person? No, I'm pathologically indecisive. I wrote the book because I would spend 10 minutes in the cereal aisle choosing between Honey Nut Cheerios and Apple Cinnamon Cheerios”. He says that he wrote a whole book because he couldn’t decide what Cheerios to buy at the grocery store. This shows he has good intentions off the smallest of things in his life. In conclusion Lehrer has a good integrity no matter what he goes through he will always have good morals.

So in the end, Lehrer is really hard working, never gives up, and has good ethics. He shows his resilience by perseverance, by continuing to write books and articles even in the face of adversary, heś showed his diligence by checking each book for plagiarism after the public marked for plagiarism it on his two other books, and he showed integrity by not completely losing his mind while doing these stressful things and spending time with his loved ones. Jonah Lehrer is an inspiration to me because when I grow up I want to be a neurologist and he never gives up in what he’s doing and learns from his mistakes, this relates to me and my school work. I´ve got awfully bad grades in middle school so when I went to high school I worked a lot harder to try and to get better grades. Jonah Lehrer is an inspiration not only to me but to all to never abandon hope in what you do.

Works Cited

Alter, Alexandra. “A Fraud? Jonah Lehrer Says His Remorse Is Real.” The New York Times, The New York

Times, 11 July 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/books/a-fraud-jonah-lehrer-says-his-remorse-is-real.html

"Jonah Lehrer." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2018. Biography In Context,

https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1000183069/BIC?u=powa9245&sid=BIC&xid=6767151e. Accessed 6 May 2018.

Lehrer, Jonah. “The Neuroscience of Effort.” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 June 2017,

www.wired.com/2012/05/the-neuroscience-of-effort/.

Solomon, Deborah. "Mind Games." The New York Times Magazine, 14 Dec. 2008, p. 24(L). Biography In

Context, https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A190514068/BIC?u=powa9245&sid=BIC&xid=a9c72fa3. Accessed 6 May 2018.