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.
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