Legacy

One of the most interesting stories from Outliers the book, involves the Southeastern corner of Kentucky. Up in the Cumberland Plateau is a wild country where the city of Harland lies. It was founded in 1819 by 80 immigrants who had come from the northern regions of the British Isle. The two prominent founders were Howard and Turner. Their Grandsons played a game of poker and argued about cheating and one shot the other dead. It is interesting that one of the Turner boys that was shot and killed was William Turner (same name as Pirates of the Caribbean). He apparently came into the home howling in pain when his mother told him to stop that and die like a man like his brother did. He shut his mouth and died. Many more family feuds are recording along the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky and West Virginia. This is what the book calls the Appalachian pattern. The book attributes this pattern to a plague Sociologists call a "culture of honor." It is a world that took root in the highlands and also area's like Sicily, or Basque regions. It is a culture of Herdsman whose livelihood is dependent upon them alone and a man's reputation is central to his livelihood and self worth. It also has to do with where the original inhabitants of the region came from the scotch-Irish. They were a people in a lawless land steeped in violence protecting their livelihood generally livestock. The south has a strange higher than the rest of the country murder rates generally where the people know each other and why the murder happened. They have less property and "stranger" crimes.

So in the 1990's the University of Michigan decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of honor. They insulted young men and then measured their anger response. The ones who were the angriest grew up on the south. They didn't necessarily even have British ancestors but grew up on the cultural legacy of the South. This is interesting because in my opinion it fits what I have learned about gifts and talents. We inherit many of our gifts and talents from our ancestors. I believe we also inherit our ancestors' weaknesses that if we can identify at an early age in life we can overcome these weaknesses and not pass them on to our children.

The book talks about ethnic legacies too where we get certain behavior from the culture we are from. He goes into a lot of detail about plane crashes especially ones from Korea. Korean air just about shut down because there were so many crashes compared to other airlines. They discovered that between the pilot and co-pilot there is a cultural barrier that is hard to transcend where the co-pilot does not feel they can assert themselves. The typical accident comes from minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. The kinds of errors that occur involve lack of teamwork and communication.

Now I don't know what all of this has to do with outliers except that our culture and ethnic backgrounds can get in the way of success if we don't recognize them. I think the author was filling in his book so he could have enough information to sell it. Don't get me wrong it is interesting and entertaining but, a little off subject I think. So is the next part that talks about a specific school where children go to school for long hours every day. It mentions that school was started for something for kids to do in the winter when the harvest was over. Then from that came the thought that if we work our brains too hard it will cause mental disorder. But, this school proves all of that false. You can work your brain hard and excel.

One of the points of school that I thought the most interesting is that they took kids that were from poor income families to go to this special charter school and they do as well as all the others. They found out that the problem with the lower income families is that they don't get the stimulation from education in the summer that the other kids do. They spend their time just playing in their neighborhood whereas the other upper and middle income families take their children to the museums and make sure they read during the summer. When they put these children in summer school when the next year came they were right where all the other children were. They did not lose their knowledge over the summer. So that is a plug for doing year round school unless but, only for the lower income families.

One thing I didn't mention was the thought about china and rice patties that the book brought out in the last chapters. It is so interesting that growing rice is not an easy endeavor. Building the patties, keeping the water temperature right, weeding, and on and on. They have found that Chinese and other oriental counties that grow rice are better in math and they think it has something to do with rice patties. The Chinese have an amazing work ethic In the rice patties so maybe that is why.

So hard work and divine providence plus a good parenting style and success is inevitable-that is a good thing to know.

IQ matters only to a point

Terman, a young professor of psychology at Stanford university, decided to make the gifted his life's work. He sorted through records of 250000 elementary and high school students, and identified 1470 children who's IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. This group came to be known as the "termites". He tracked them throughout their life like a mother hen. He said once that there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ, except possibly his morals. The book Outliers describes that the relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. In fact the universities where people come from that have won the Nobel Prize where not any better than Notre Dame or the University of Illinois that's all. So success does not matter if you are really intelligent you just have to be smart enough like smart enough to get into college but not necessarily Harvard. Even if Harvard were one of your choices you would find more smart people at Harvard but, it would not necessarily translate into success. If Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites, and dispensed with IQ a altogether he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses.

The story of two geniuses is very interesting. One genius goes to college loses his scholarship because his mom failed to file the financial forms. Then his transmission on his car runs out and he can't get the college to change his classes so he drops out. Another genius who has helped on the nuclear bomb he was a genius too who went to Harvard and Cambridge. His tutor (who later won the Nobel Prize) forced him to attend to the minutiae of experimental physics, which he hated. He grew more and more emotionally unstable and took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor. But, all the discipline he got from that was to be put on probation. This brings into mind that intelligence that allows you to talk your way out of murder or convince your professor to move you to the afternoon class is why at the psychologist Robert Sternberg call "practical Intelligence.". Practical Intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. Ernie has high practical intelligence and that is what makes him so good with people.

Where do you get practical intelligence? Well that is where we get into parenting. Wealthy parents intervened on their children's behalf, middle class parents use concerted cultivation to foster and assess a child's talents, opinions and skills. Poor parents tend to follow a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth. The middle class child is exposed to a shifting set of experiences. They are expected to think for themselves, challenge adults, and work out their own solutions to problems. But, given support from their parents in these endeavors. It appears Concerted cultivation is the key factor in developing practical intelligence.

Terman put his termites into 3 different categories based on how successful they were. The A's of course were very successful, the B's satisfactory and the C's dropouts. Then he tried to find the reason why they were there. It turns out the A's came from families in the middle to upper class who had parents that used concerted cultivation with books in their homes. So to make it to success you have to have a family or community supporting you and helping you navigate the world IQ is not enough on its own.

Outliers-10000 hours

It is hard to describe what I have learned from this book. It starts out talking about birthdays of Hockey players in Canada. The birthdays of the best hockey players fall in the months of January February and March. This is because the cutoff is December and so the first 3 months the players are the oldest. They are the bigger players and more likely pick for travel leagues and get all that extra playing time and attention. This is the same for baseball, basketball, as well as academics.

Bill Joy that started Sun Microsystems and who wrote most of the stuff we use to access the internet started at the University of Michigan when he was sixteen. The college just purchased a new computer system and he was hooked. He programmed whenever he could. There was a study by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson in the early 1990's. They studied music students from the Academy of Music. The study found that if the student put roughly 10,000 hours of practice in they were master's level musicians. But, if they only put in 8000 hours then they were only good students. This repeats itself in other disciplines so according to Malcolm Gadwall there is no such thing as natural. So if I practices singing an hour a day then in 24 years I could be a master of singing. That is how Bill Joy did it he spent hours and hours programming until he was a master. Even Mozart's early works are only considered not outstanding and written down by his father.

This is good news, because anything we like to do we just have to be disciplined in our practice and we can master whatever it is after 10000 hours. I think I almost come close to that with cooking that is why for the first time in my life I am starting to cook without recipes and it is not bad, most of the time.

The interesting point the book makes about Bill Joy and others is that when he went to college he didn't know anything about computers and before that time a computer had a tedious punch card system that wasn't programming just more like proofreading. Bill Joy went to the University of Michigan just as they switched to a new time-sharing computer that allowed multiple tasks at once. He was looking to go into engineering or math and just stumbled upon the computer lab. This is where my concept of the situation is different than the book because of my belief in Divine Providence. I believe Bill Joy was guided to the computer room by the spirit and to that University. It was no coincidence like Malcolm says-no chance occurrence. He calls it opportunity presented itself and that is true but by the end of the book and the many examples he gives of this same opportunity occurring again and again I believe it is Divine Providence.

If the opportunity had presented to Bill Joy and he did not enjoy computers or he did not have a strong work ethic for the accumulation of the 10000 hours than we might not have had the internet today or maybe someone else would have seized the opportunity. Of course he went overboard and programmed about 8 hours a day. By the time he went to Berkeley he was doing it day and night. He and his colleges would have reoccurring nightmares of forgetting to go to class.

The Beatles-were made because they went to Hamburg to a night club and played eight hours a day for 270 nights that's over 1200 hours performing time. Most bands don't perform that much in their whole careers. So when they came to America they had so much practice already that they were good.

Bill Gates' father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle and his mother a well-to-do banker. His parents sent him to lakeside private school. Midway through Gates' second year the school started a computer lab and spent a thousand dollars on a computer. Then the University of Washington chose lakeside, because one of the founders had a son there, to test out the company's software programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time. When that went Bankrupt gates and his friends hung around the university until they latched on to another outfit called ISI which was working on payroll software. Then when he crashed the system after stealing passwords his friend found that there was free computer time from 3-6 in the morning at the medical center or physics department. By the time Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start his own software company he had been programming nonstop for seven consecutive years which is way past 10,000 hours.