It was one of those days where I was reflecting about what I have been doing with my life, and thinking about how some people just have the luck to be at the right place, right time, with the right person, when my friend recommended me this book Outliers. Basically, his message was that the world is unfair and we just have to accept it. It's not that we are not as capable, not as intelligent, we were just not as lucky.
There were three main things that really sunk into me.
1. The society and institution set the rule books. Rule books can favour certain people over others.
2. The privileged simply have more opportunities, hence chances, to succeed, than others.
3. The earlier you clock your 10,000 hours of practice to hone your skill, the earlier you can monetise the skill. If you get ahead of the pack, you can win big.
The first half of the book was about a research done on birthdays of junior hockey league players. It was a serendipitous moment where someone noticed that the birthdays of the players were mostly in Jan and Feb. The junior hockey leagues were designed to have many levels, and the grouping is by calendar year, starting from primary 1. The research found that at the 1st year, those born in Jan and Feb had more time practising hockey than those born in Nov and Dec, hence usually made it into the more superior levels in the following year. Year after year, the Jan and Feb players keep moving up the ranks, get better coaches, spend more time training, and eventually have higher chances of becoming national players.
Moral of story: Exams, just like junior hockey leagues, favour the Jan and Feb babies. Banded subject classes, streaming students based on grades, should be thrown out of the window, because it just makes the students who are ahead, much better, than those falling behind. Over time, because the pace of those falling behind will be slower and slower, it's just going to end up worse as the years go by.
The second half of the book was about a few prominent billionaires and their growing up years. Usually one reads that Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, or Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start Facebook, but nobody says that prior to dropping out, they had already clocked their 10,000 hours of professional practice and was already working on a business. In fact, they had clocked their 10,000 hours before they finished secondary school. Their parents were also well-to-do, hence gave them the opportunity to clock those programming practice hours. They beat their peers to the programming practice because they had access to computers for longer periods of time, unlimited and free access that came from privilege.
Moral of story: I really should have started a software development business or writing business back when I was in school, instead of wasting my 10,000 hours of programming practice and 10,000 hours of writing practice. I made a sub-optimal decision to start clocking stock analysis practice hours while studying. Now I have all these skills that are not part of a supply chain, hence I can't do a 1+1+1=10 kind of magic. I really should beat myself up for not being a millionaire now.
No comments:
Post a Comment