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Flowers For Algernon Analysis

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Motivation Vs. Intelligence: What is More Important? In the story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, a man named Charlie Gordon, who has an IQ of 68, has an experimental operation to make him smarter. Even though Charlie was very dumb, he was extremely motivated. This is what led him to be chosen for the experiment. As he gained intelligence, his motivation drove him to discover new research for why his mouse friend, Algernon, experienced decaying intelligence. Many people think intelligence is more important than motivation, but they have not considered the reasons why motivation is more important than being smart. Someone who is smart has the potential to do great things. However, if they lack motivation, those things will never get done. Without being motivated, being intelligent is useless because …show more content…

People who are successful would not be without motivation. This is because they would not want to push themselves, and would never get anything done. While they might be intelligent, they would never use their smarts for the greater good because it would require difficult thinking, and/ or determination. In the story, Keyes talks about how Charlie is working day and night trying to find out the reason for Algernon’s sudden regression and why it killed him. The doctors say he is working too hard “trying to cram a lifetime of research and thought into a few weeks”, buit that doesn’t stop him. Five days later, Charlie successfully interpreted the “Algernon-Gordon Effect”, which explained why Algernon’s intelligence decayed at the same rate it multiplied. (301). As one can see, Charlie’s ambition resulted in a huge success in the field of neurological experiments, further demonstrating that motivation is what drives success. Intelligence cannot get you that far- Charlie could have sat around during the peak of his intelligence, and would have never conducted his ground-breaking experiments if he did not have motivation to do

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