This lovely Willy Wonka quote brings to mind the main idea of Gladwell’s book--that tenacity is key to being successful. Take a young student named Renee for example. As Gladwell reports, “Alan Schoenfeld, a math professor at Berkeley” (239) create a math computer program dealing with the concept of slope, which required users to use their problem-solving skills to figure out problems. But, what was special about Renee is that she is not a math major--she is a nurse--and she keeps struggling and trying over and over again in order to solve the problem. Gladwell writes, “Renee wasn’t a math natural...But Renee persists” (245). That persistence is what makes Renee, and others like her, unique. As Schoenfield commented, “‘There’s a will to make sense that drives what she does...She wouldn’t accept a superficial ‘Yeah, you’re right’ and walk away...And that’s really unusual’” (245). To someone like me--who is persistent and always wants to know “why” something happens or “why” something is the way it is--that persistence is not unusual. That persistence is just doing what you have to do to get the job done. I realized the importance of persistence when I was working with my entire department last month. While there were teachers who had used a new program longer than I had, they gave up trying to find some information after a few attempts. But I kept trying. And, after about 5 minutes of playing around with it, I was able to figure out where the information was that we needed. And others commented on my persistence! But, the thing is, I did not think anything of my persistence--I did not understand why these teachers would not keep trying different things. And it puzzled me that they were not excited about trying to figure out where the information was (but then again, I find computers really fun and love getting a new electronic device to figure out). But perhaps it is because there’s the axiom that there’s always something new in education to figure out regarding technology and when teachers finally learn this system, they’ll have another one to learn that’s completely different. Regardless though, the message remains: Gladwell states, “Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds” (246). So basically, May the force of success be with you all.
Hard work.
No one wants to do it, but it’s crucial to survival in this world. Many people may label themselves as hardworking--it’s a quality LinkedIn has on their website as a selectable attribute for your profile. But what does that necessarily mean? According to Gladwell, in the case of Bill Joy, the Beatles, and other successful people--”10,000 hours” (47) is approximately how long it takes to get “good” at something. That’s a lot of hours. But it makes sense. I took piano lessons for 11 years. Let’s approximate how many hours I’ve spent doing that. Considering I had one 30 minute-45 lesson per week with the exception of holidays, etc. let’s just say everything evened out to approximately an hour per week. I had about 48 lessons per year for 11 years (528 hours), not including the 4 hours per week spent practicing (2288 hours). Plus, extra practice (220 hours) and recital prep (352 hours), hours studying music theory (264 hours), transposing music (100 hours), and seven years of actually teaching students 2 hours per week (1448 hours). 528+220+2288+352+264+100+728+420 =4900 hours. So, I’m not even halfway there to 10,000 hours. But considering I had to attend school and had other responsibilities and activities and jobs, etc. I think I did fairly well! When I look at teaching--I’ll need 10,000 hours to actually “get good” at it. Considering I had over 600 hours of AVID tutoring experience, 1448 hours of piano teaching experience, and approximately 3292 hours of student teaching, substitute teaching, and other teacher tasks (grading, emails, meetings, etc.), I am only about 5340 hours into reaching the 10,000 hours of experience in the teaching world (and AVID tutoring is not full teaching--it certainly helped me gain invaluable skills and experience working with high school students though). So, only a little under 5000 hours to go! But one thing is clear--experience is definitely a factor in increasing one’s abilities. And, as Gladwell points out, our experiences and circumstances affect our opportunities. Take, for example, my piano teaching experience. If I had not been bad at math when I was younger, I would never have been enrolled in piano lessons. And If my piano instructor did not have to leave for New York to get a recording contract when I was 15, I would not have taught the two kids on the block. Then, if I did not teach them, I would never have gotten the piano instructor job at the YMCA, which would have not allowed me to get more clients outside, which includes a current student and her brother. Or, look at where I am in the CSUSM program now. I applied to be an AVID tutor because I had gotten turned down from the 33 jobs I had applied for at hte age of 18. I would not have gotten the job--or even known about it--if I had not made an appointment at the MiraCosta Career Center for resume help and job search assistance. Then I would not have had the 5 years of experience tutoring and been inspired to teach and encouraged to go into the program. So, as I see it, and as Professor McGonagall would say it was all a result of:
So here's to sheer dumb luck!
What is an outlier? Statistics defines it as something that is out of the normal range and is considered insignificant to the data set when looking at general trends.
What Gladwell argues in his book Outliers: The Story of Success is that an outlier IS significant—it’s where the “normal rules [do] not apply” (7). Being an outlier is something literally extraordinary--out of the ordinary--and aren’t they significant? Gladwell aims to examine why people who are out of the ordinary—these outliers—are so successful. Gladwell argues that many of these perceived “outliers” are not really outliers at all and are, instead, conforming to what one would expect given the circumstances surrounding them. For instance, he examines a hockey team and finds something strange--the majority of the players were born in the first few months of the year. He then looks further and sees that those who are born in the first few months of the year, go to kindergarten later--at or near age 6--and not at age 5 due to the cutoff date at the end of the year (between September and December depending on the school). And, as a result, the older child has had more of a time to mature. In kindergarten and other elementary school years, children are then separated by “ability grouping” (28) and tracked into those classes. Really though, Gladwell argues that the majority of students are grouped based on maturity. I remember those groups when I was a kid, but the interesting thing is I was born on August 13th. The cutoff date to enroll at my school was September 1st. So, I turned 5 in August and then, 20 days later, I had my first day of kindergarten. But the weird thing is, I was in the high level reading group and, later on, placed in the higher level math group as well. So, I was truly grouped by ability rather than maturity. I am an outlier. I never really realized that I was different in any way--except that I was the shortest kid in my class and I was not very strong. Perhaps because I was the shortest and, probably physically weakest kid in my class, I realized I could not be the tallest or the strongest. But, I could read a lot and work really hard. Now that I think on it, it was likely a subconscious coping strategy. I am not really sure what to attribute to my success—because—as evidenced by Gladwell’s examples comparing geniuses—clearly intelligence and achievement are unrelated to each other (90). I remember some of my classmates asking me when I was younger how I was so smart. I would respond that anyone could do what I do--I use my resources, I am persistent, I do my best, and I work hard. I did not think I was smart and honestly, even now, I really don’t think that I’m any smarter than most people. I just have this internal drive to be successful and I am not afraid of hard work. But how did I get to be this way? I’m honestly not sure, but I’m hoping Gladwell will be able to help me figure it out. |