CURIOSITY REDEFINES THE LIMITS: Advantages Gained from Life, the Workplace, and the Boardroom is an autobiographical work detailing Rodney C. Adkins’s outlook on life, featuring perspectives gained through a lifetime lived in the engineering industry. Adkins frames the book’s contents as “part memoir, part playbook,” though in truth it contains more of the former than the latter. A Floridian by upbringing, Adkins grew up in Miami, and was noted for an insatiable curious streak as a child. Adkins excelled in math and athletics among other activities, but a teenage encounter with a punch card computer impelled him to strive for a career in the burgeoning computer engineering industry.
Attending Rollins College and Georgia Tech, Adkins acquired a deep knowledge of several early computer languages such as FORTRAN and BASIC while also experiencing fraternity life. If there is one thing that consistently comes across in his memoir, it is that Adkins is, by any standards, an exceptionally high achiever. Being one of less than 100 recipients of fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi’s Lauren Wreath Award, having other honorary doctorates, and boasting a successful career that saw him work for IBM during one of its greatest growth periods all serve as testimony to his drive and excellence.
The second half of the book details Adkins’s takeaways: the life advice that he followed in pursuit of his accomplishments. He studied karate, a skill that was invaluable in dealing with the bullies that sometimes blocked his way home from school. Values instilled in him by the discipline he carried over into his business career, along with many others: the importance of resilience, the ability to “[make] your career your career,” being humble about one’s success, and so forth. The style is lucid, straightforward, and accessible, and Adkins invokes well-known works by business leaders and psychologists to drive home his points.
The lack of a more formalized framework for these life lessons strikes one as both a help and a hindrance. Far too many business leaders and industry luminaries seek to shoehorn their accumulated wisdom into models that are trite or ill-thought out, and it’s refreshing to see Adkins refusing to follow suit. At the same time, many of the takeaways listed here are workaday in nature, a fact that underlines the book’s chief value as a record of a life well-lived.
Erudite and thoughtful, CURIOSITY REDEFINES THE LIMITS: Advantages Gained from Life, the Workplace, and the Boardroom is a fascinating glimpse into the drive that motivated Rodney C. Adkins to achieve in all spheres of life.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader