Choice and Chance
I just finished reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html It's a fascinating book that really demystifies the American fascination with how success happens. There are always outside forces at work in one person or culture's success and hardly any success can be assigned to a singular instance of luck. A few of the points of the book are sitting with me- I had no idea what an impact having a short school year has on our children. According to Gladwell's citations, most other developed countries have a much longer school year and he can directly correlate our student's subpar performance to this fact. While we can argue the value of a tradition of summer vacation, the point is mute when we examine the lives of poor and at-risk youth who miss out on a wealth of opportunity to continue building their skills and possibly escaping their economic reality. This is why Finn will attend summer school from now on... :P Okay, not really, but I am interested in the idea of a longer school year- even if we are talking about only a few extra weeks.
The book is filled with interesting correlations that expound on the outside influences of success. Let me just say, if I plan to give birth to a successful hockey player then I better time my pregnancy accordingly and if I really want to cut back on my workload then there are some tribes in Botswana who have this figured out.
Most importantly, to become a master at something- 10,000 hours seems to be the magical threshold required. This led me to ask myself- if I had to pick one thing that I could be truly proficient at, what would it be? Let's eliminate parenting for its obvious emotional complications, but what would it be? I find it hard to distill my choices down to one. If you are interested, tell me what you would dedicate your 10,000 hours to? Today I would want to dedicate those hours to visual art (no, I won't pick one hehe), but Saturday I was sure it would be meditation.
One thing is for certain- the more we are objectively observing our reality, the more we can yield the forces of potential. With that said, we are all subject to the whims of chance.
The book is filled with interesting correlations that expound on the outside influences of success. Let me just say, if I plan to give birth to a successful hockey player then I better time my pregnancy accordingly and if I really want to cut back on my workload then there are some tribes in Botswana who have this figured out.
Most importantly, to become a master at something- 10,000 hours seems to be the magical threshold required. This led me to ask myself- if I had to pick one thing that I could be truly proficient at, what would it be? Let's eliminate parenting for its obvious emotional complications, but what would it be? I find it hard to distill my choices down to one. If you are interested, tell me what you would dedicate your 10,000 hours to? Today I would want to dedicate those hours to visual art (no, I won't pick one hehe), but Saturday I was sure it would be meditation.
One thing is for certain- the more we are objectively observing our reality, the more we can yield the forces of potential. With that said, we are all subject to the whims of chance.