Category: Malcolm Gladwell

Do we really just need to put more time on it?

On the way down to Wintergreen today we listened to more of Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers. The last chapter was perhaps the most interesting to me–about the KIP school in Bronx, where they get rid of summer vacation and essentially catch inner city kids up to their elite private school brethren, at least in mathematics. The notion is that while the rich kids go to summer camp and read, the poor kids just watch TV and play. They fall behind over the summer break. Apparently Korea and Japan don’t really have much of a summer vacation–which to Gladwell, explains their excellence at quantitative subjects entirely.

This is an attractive idea to me because it gets out the tired framework of nature versus nurture. Maybe it’s neither–it’s just getting, to use Gladwell’s term, your “10,000 hours” in.
There’s a case there for simple showing up and hard work. I like that.
Jim

Passion about science

I had breakfast this morning with several faculty colleagues. We were discussing the odd question of what it takes to be successful in science. This is not a trivial matter. It certainly takes more than raw intelligence. There’s something beyond doing well in courses and scoring well on exams. There are experiments completed, papers written, talks given and fundamentally there is something more than the sum which gives rise to scientific success as measured of course by substantive scientific discovery.

I think back to the sport I played in high school: what we here in the US call soccer and the world calls football. Every weekend in my Arlington Virginia neighborhood I observe toddlers playing the same game that David Beckham and Pele played, albeit at a completely different level. And the difference in play across the spectrum of that sport is not simply raw talent. I’m sure that Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours plays an important role in turning a toddler into a soccer star. But there is also a passion to be the best that differentiates the teenage soccer “prodigies” from the Beckham-level athletes.
And that’s probably true for science as well. You can’t achieve at a top level in science without a combination of innate talent, Gladwell’s hours and a passion to be the best. As a result, other things in life have to give way perhaps–no doubt Tiger Woods gave up some quality time at some point to hone his golf game, even with his superior natural giftedness.
It can’t happen spontaneously–there’s the necessity for hard work (as well as good luck) to be counted among the best in science. That prioritization–that putting the science first: that’s passion.