Outliers
I just finished Outliers, a book Malcolm Gladwell. The book is fascinating - yet has a rather depressing note to it.
The examples in the book are many and varied, and go from why most Canadian hockey league players are born in January to why most geniuses don’t actually get anywhere in life. It all comes down to one core argument, though: To be successful, be born in the right place, at the right time, to the right family, and then become obsessed with the right thing.
The statistics presented lead inexorably to the conclusion that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field, and that to get this amount of experience at a young age, such as with Bill Gates, Oppenheimer, and several other individuals mentioned in the book, a person has to be brought up in a certain way, with enough resources to take advantage of that opportunity. Didn’t have the opportunity? Born to a poor family? Sucks to be you.
Looking at it from another perspective, you could take the view that the whole book is one giant apology from a genius for being smart, and that really feels like a slap in the face to someone like me, who centers a large part of their self-worth around being a geek. By golly, if just being smart isn’t good enough to make it, then what is?
In all of that uneasy, anti-intellectual sounding morass, though, there are two dimly shining lights in the text if you look hard enough. The first is that there’s a lot of squandered talent out there, and if we made some adjustments to our society and how we think about success, we could go from having a handful of Oppenheimers in a generation to having hundreds or even thousands.
The second is the idea that, so long as you have an iota of talent at something, it takes 10,000 hours of hard work to become an expert in a field. That’s it. The difference between world-class violinists and people who dabble in their spare time? 10,000 hours. As long as you put that much time into it, you can be an expert, regardless of your background or whatever. If you can forget the rest of the book about social background and ethnic influences, this is a pretty inspiring point. If you lived, ate, and breathed a topic, practicing for 16 hours a day, that means you could be an expert in something in just under two years.
On the other hand… this is also one of the points I take as rather contentious for one very simple reason: Tim Ferris.
Life Hackers
Tim Ferris is the author of ‘The Four-Hour Work Week’ and a reputed ‘life hacker’. He has a degree in neuroscience, is a world-class tango dancer, a national Chinese kickboxing champion, a best-selling author, and mastered the Japanese art of horseback archery, yabusame, in less than a single week. Not two years - five days.
As I underatand it, Tim draws on skills he’s learned from past experience, techniques he’s learned for body hacking, and a keen sense of observation to accomplish these feats. He relates drawing the arrows for reloading to scooping up a SCUBA respirator if you lose it, something he already has wel lingrained. He know that REM cycles ingrain short-term memory to long term, and that we have two per night, so waking up in the middle of the night for practice allows him to double his retention. And finally, he watches - really /watches/ - at what separates the experts from the amateurs. He breaks down their technique, and then just practices the key elements of the experts without going through the messy business of trial-and-error everyone else does.
Some people might say he’s faking it, or that he’s not a ‘real’ expert because he didn’t go up through the ranks like everyone else. But you can’t argue with results. In his final run, he performed flawlessly, riding at a full gallop with a Japanese longbow without holding onto the reins, and hit every single one the targets dead-on.
Has Tim Ferris spent 10,000 hours practicing the skills of a yabusame without realizing it? Or is he an expert at acquiring new skills? Or is the statistical fact that people who have mastered a skill spent 10,000 hours in practice the result of other social-biased, preconceived notions about learning?
What if we could all learn a new skill in a single week? And what if we could provide every student in the world with the same skills at learning, and the same opportunity to learn?