Is anyone here familiar with Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers"?
I heard him talking about it in interviews, but I have not been able to get it at the library yet.
One point he makes is about Asians and their math
skills [every year they win the top 5 spots in the worldwide
contests] - Gladwell says it is because their ancestors grew
rice, and growing rice is more labour intensive than growing
wheat.
Gladwell, and successfull people,
generally believe that success is anything but "a better brain" , as in
not from being more intelligent, or more skilled or more talented. They
all say it is from hard work, and nothing else.
Even the Beatles!! - they simply got into a situation where they played
1200 live gigs, mostly in Hamburg Germany, and nobody gets a
chance like that...
Hockey players are born in
January so they are bigger when training camp comes around. That one
steps out of the "hard work" theme a bit.
Gladwell
claims that anyone who gets the chance to put in 10,000 hours of work
at something [anything] WILL get good at it.
From other sources, I hear sucessfull people claim that they simply
worked harder. And it is true, they did, but I wonder if they worked
harder in school because they got good marks when they put in the
effort, whereas others just didn't manage to get the marks, and hence
there was not the same kind of reward for studying hard.
Personally, I believe that many or most of the unsuccessfull people
have something wrong in the noggin. No insult intended, but it must be
possible to have brain damage, and what chance do they stand of
getting to be a CEO? Or even holding down a decent job that lots of
people are competing for?
Maybe if I read the book I would see that those are two different
things altogether - the successfull and the unsuccessfull - but it
cannot be denied that from one extreme to the other in the continuum of
success in our modern world that the low end is populated with
people with less mental abilities, and that although the most or more
successfull people certainly DO work harder than others, they also seem
to have a bit of a bright spark going on.
I didn't
do well in school, and by the time I was in grade 7 I wasn't putting t
much effort into my schoolwork, but I also remember being very
frustrated in earlier years because I wanted to please my dad and get
good marks, but just gave up after awhile.
Do
any of you remember feeling like that? Did you try hard and put in the
hours, or not? Should I am assume that none of you are
"successfull" to any major degree, because if you were you would not be
spending this time online?