The Luck of the Calendar

In Outliers,by Malcolm Gladwell, Gladwell zeros in on the story behind success. One of the major factors that contribute to the amount of success a person has is what month they were born in. Gladwell uses rosters of sports teams to point out that the vast majority of the players on that roster were born in the first few months of the year. This is because there is a huge gap of development that occurs in children around the age of ten and the players that are lucky enough to be born in the early months have a huge advantage physically and mentally. This is the reason why many young players on Canadian Hockey teams were born in the first three months of the year and continue to get better at an exponential rate because they are the ones that recieve the best coaching. Ultimately the young hockey players are able to turn pro and become successful simply because they were born in the early months of the year:a trend that is evident in different sports worldwide.

Location, Location, Location

    I have always thought about what makes the well-accomplished and extremely successful people we all talk about highly so successful.  Of course hard work, determination, and persistence to achieve life goals comes into the equation of success.  It isn't surprising that a little bit luck is also a factor that comes into play; however, when reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I never knew how much luck really is a factor is in the success of people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Some examples of the types of luck a person can acquire are birth dates, location, and the success of a person's parents.  Although a person's birth date is in an unchangeable fact for a person, location is changeable.  As explained in Outliers, opportunities can arise in the location a person was raised in.
    A famous example of such a person is Steve Jobs, the co founder of Apple Computers.  He wasn't born into a wealthy family, but that type of luck wasn't a factor in Job's story.  Location was. Jobs grew up in the city of Mountain View, California, which was the epicenter of Silicon Valley.  Jobs grew up in a city filled with inspiring engineers who were observing technology is a different way.  Gladwell remarked, "Jobs came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later dominate."  This was undoubtedly true since took advantage of his location in the Silicon Valley and took summer jobs in a dominating global electronic firm.    
    Gladwell's thoughts about location being a factor to a person's success had me thinking about my own life.  What opportunities would have arisen had I been born into a rich, upper class family?  Would I have become enthralled in engineering had I grew in the Silicon Valley, like Steve Jobs?

What are your thoughts on location being a key factor in success? 

Thing to Know to Be Successful

     The book that I chose to read is the Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Before I picked this book up I thought that it would reveal some secrets on how to be really successful in life. It does. Like I never knew that doing an activity for 10,000 hours or more results in you being an expert in it. However Gladwell mentioned a lot of other factors that also contribute to one's success. For example there is the year one is born, the surrounding they grew up in, and the opportunities that they are given. He writes it in a way that makes you think that you can not be successful unless you are born in the right time period or you live in the right community. Did anyone else feel that way while they were reading? 

Reaching For The Stars

     Having the right mindset and determination is the key to success. Mindset by Carol S. Dweck states that there are two different mindsets that people have: fixed or growth. Dweck uses many scenarios that emphasize the difference among these two. One example Dweck states is that people with a fixed mindset believes that they are better than others when they are successful. However, people with a growth mindset takes their success and stays humble with it. People with the fixed mindset would ask themselves: "If you're somebody when you're successful, what are you when you're unsuccessful".
     Although Mindset is all about having the growing mindset, I believe that we need a balance of having both a fixed and growing one. If all we have is a growth mindset, where would our limitations be? If we just have a fixed mindset, would we try to reach above and beyond our comfort standards?Where do you stand on this argument?

The importance of age

Something that Malcolm Gladwell goes into depth into in the beginning of his book is age and the month you were born in. He explains how the month you were born on affects you in so many ways. For example, if the cut off for a youth sports league is January 1st, anyone born in the beginning of the year will have a huge developmental advantages than those born at the end of the year. At a young age months makes a huge difference in maturity and because of that the older kids can become much better players than the younger ones. Then, Gladwell goes into saying how that leads to even more adavantages for them. The better players will be scouted for a more advanced team in which they will practice more and much more intensely making them much better players. Like this they leave behind the younger kids who did not get that opportunity because of their maturity and creates a huge gap between the two. As they get older the older kids will increasingly become better and better and will have a much better chance at becoming professional players. As Gladwell was saying all this he makes it sound as though the younger kids have very little chance at ever becoming professional players like the older ones.

Reading all this made me think about myself, because I am born at the end of the year and for almost everything I have always been one of the younger people. So does everything that goal say apply in the longer run?

Development and Twins

David Shenk challenges everything we have been taught about talent/intelligence and its relationship with genetics and our environment in his book The Genius in All of Us.  He claims "talent is not a thing, it's a process" and it has little to do with genetics only; instead it has to do with genetics, practice and our environment.  Shenk encourages the reader to get rid of that negative mindset that discourages us from taking risks and trying, which is the idea that people are born talented or smarter than others. Shenk also claims "children develop only as the environment demands development", which I agree with based on my own experience.  In a trip i took to Mexico two summers ago, I noticed that almost everyone had given up education (especially the men) because there were not a lot of resources and jobs that required education (and the jobs that did, only required basic knowledge).  Their lives are limited and they don't have as much opportunities as there are here. (Also, it made me think of how each individual has their own knowledge on different things based on their environment and likes/dislikes).

I found chapter four, "The Similarities and Dissimilarities of Twins", was the most interesting chapter for me.  The chapter is exactly about what the title says.  I finished reading this chapter and had one question still in my mind.  If our environments contribute to who we are, then why are siblings often so different from each other? (They don't necessarily have to be twins). Obviously they share similarities but where do the extreme differences come from?

Overall, the book was easy to follow because of the simple words he chose to use and his inclusion of the epilogue which was full of sources and helpful information.  I finished reading feeling empowered and with the determination to improve myself.

Mindset, not Mindsets

Hey guys! So I've been reading Mindset and while discussing it in class, a lot of people in my group were complaining that the author had a bias towards one of the two mindsets that she described in her book. But as I read the book, I got the feeling that it wasn't really a bias. Well I mean, it is, but not like in a bad way. During the book she talks about two types of mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset believes, among other things, that you are born with certain capacities and you can never exceed those limits no matter how hard you try. While a growth mindset believes just the opposite. A growth mindset views challenges as times where you can learn and become stronger. The author obviously prefers the growth mindset. The people in my group were saying that the author was being unfair to the other mindset and not giving equal positive and negative things about both mindsets. But that's not the point. The point is that she's trying to convince you to have a growth mindset because that's obviously better. It's like saying the guy from The Happiness Advantage (sorry I'm too lazy to look up his name) is biased about being happy. Like yeah, yeah he is. That's the point of his book is to try to convince to be happy, not to give you all the pros and cons about being happy and being sad. Or something, I haven't actually read that book but I'm pretty sure that's what he talks about. And like, if that doesn't convince you, then like, the book is called Mindset not Mindsets.