I finished reading Malcom Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, a few nights ago.
I know what I have to say about this book is going to be completely esoteric, in the sense that you will likely have to read it before fully participating. Not that you're not brilliant people; I'm sure you can easily make sense out of my words. But my fear is that if you haven't read it, you may be tempted to take some of the things I say at face value, which is not how they're written -- they're written with the mental tapestry of Outliers as a background. I'm not sure of another way to do this, as I want to attempt to take the concepts Gladwell presents in Outliers one step further.
You should probably view these initial paragraphs as much of a disclaimer as anything else, as I don't want to "give away" the book for you. Go read it and come on back!
I enjoyed this read immensely, as I have all of Gladwell's works, and this is perhaps even my favorite. Where all his works provide plenty of abstract intellectual fodder for my mind to gleefully process for weeks, Outliers has a sharp edge of pragmatism that makes it special. It also contains tinges of the kind of social activism that really revs my engine, turns my crank, places my soapbox before a microphone... that kind of thing. Here's a few thoughts:
1. Education
How can the educational system continue to ignore works like this? In Outliers, Gladwell presents a bevy of facts (not to mention crystal clear logic) for how and why the college admission process, for one thing, is mostly an outdated ludicrous absurdity. But he doesn't stop there; it turns out, the social constructs we've built around most organized projects (schools, sports, music, etc.) have become self-fulfilling prophecies, archetypal facades that have been built on so many layers of edifice that they can no longer even see where they began, and for what purpose.
How does one even go about reforming these magnificent disasters of greed and perpetual fragmentation? Do we even try? I'm inclined to encourage the beginning of something else; to foster and support a brand new educational model, for example, that can hopefully someday replace the current system. (Gladly, some of this discussion has already begun: P21, KIPP, etc..)
2. Self-Made BS
I love the idea that the "self-made man" is a total myth. I've suspected this to be true for awhile, intuitively, so it's nice to see some logical background for it. The truth is, nobody makes it on their own. EVER.
This makes infinitely more sense to me. People don't live in a vacuum; we are constantly "made" by our social surroundings. That's not to say we have no control, but once we begin to realize that we need to change our surroundings and not just ourselves, I think we'll be a long way towards undersatnding how to better create the future.
3. Social Assessments
How can we connect an understanding of the social construction component in success with studies of our own lives, past and future?
This is the issue that intrigues me the most about the implications of Outliers: is there a way to somehow extrapolate a model from Gladwell's work to where we could analyze our own life story -- our own social constructs, our family backgrounds, the month and year in which we were born, and the particular moment of history we were born into -- and combine it with personal research into individual talents and strengths, and then multiply that knowledge by what we are passionate about, thereby providing a much more insigntful process into each person's unique "place in the world"...??
Seems like a an intense endeavor, to say the least, but just imagine the possibilities if we could! We've already made so much progress within individualized assessments (psychological, emotional, talent, etc.); why couldn't we develop systems to generate "social" or "contextual" assessments?
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I came across an fascinating list of stats provided by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore, the President of the Productivity Institute in Connecticut. Some pretty interesting stuff in here!
- There will be 2 million marriages in this country this year and 1 million divorces. 95% of divorces are caused by a “lack of communication”
- The average working person spends less than 2 minutes per day in meaningful communication with their spouse or “significant other”. The average working person spends less than 30 seconds a day in meaningful communication with their children.
- 80% of employees do not want to go to work on Monday morning. By Friday, the rate only drops to 60%.
- 31% of working Americans do not use all their vacation time that they have earned. On average, three out of twelve (one quarter!) of all vacation days go unused.
- The average person gets 1 interruption every 8 minutes, or approximately 7 an hour, or 50-60 per day. The average interruption takes 5 minutes, totaling about 4 hours or 50% of the average workday. 80% of those interruptions are typically rated as “little value” or “no value” creating approximately 3 hours of wasted time per day.
- On an average day, there are 17 million meetings in America.
- By taking 1 hour per day for independent study, 7 hours per week, 365 hours in a year, one can learn at the rate of a full-time student. In 3-5 years, the average person can become an expert in the topic of their choice, by spending only one hour per day.
- 95% of the books in this country are purchased by 5% of the population. 95% of self-improvement books, audio tapes, and video tapes purchased are not used.
- 97% of workers, if they became financially independent, would not continue with their current employer or in their current occupation.
- 20% of the average workday is spent on “crucial” and “important” things, while 80% of the average workday is spent on things that have “little value” or “no value”.
- In the last 20 years, working time has increased by 15% and leisure time has decreased by 33%.
- A person who works with a “messy” or cluttered desk spends, on average, 1 1/2 hours per day looking for things or being distracted by things or approximately 7 1/2 per workweek. “Out of sight; out of mind.” When it’s in sight, it’s in mind.
- The average reading speed is approximately 200 words per minute. The average working person reads 2 hours per day. A Speed Reading course that will improve the reading rate to 400 words per minute will save an hour per day.
- 90% of those who join health and fitness clubs will stop going within the first 90 days.
- 9 out of 10 people daydream in meetings.
- 60% of meeting attendees take notes to appear as if they are listening.
- 40% of working people skip breakfast. 39% skip lunch. Of those who take a lunch break, 50% allow only 15 minutes or less.
- The average American watches 28 hours of television per week.
- 78% of workers in America wish they had more time to “smell the roses”.
- 49% of workers in America complain that they are on a treadmill.
- Angry people are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack as a person in better control of their emotions.
- 75% of heart attacks occur between the hours of 5:00 a.m.-8:00 a.m., local time, and more heart attacks occur on Monday than on any other day of the week.
- 25% of sick days are taken for illness. 75% of sick days are taken for other reasons.
- 95% of the things we fear will occur, do not occur.
- Taking 5 minutes per day, 5 days per week to improve one’s job will create 1,200 little improvements to a job over a 5 year period.
- 1 out of 3 workers changes jobs every year.
- 1 out of 5 people moves every year.
- 70% of American workers desire to own their own business.
- 75% of American workers complain that they are tired.
- The average worker gets a 6 hours and 57 minutes of sleep per night.
- The average worker spends 35 minutes per day commuting.
- When someone is asking for our time for a meeting, 80% of the time, there is an alternate date and time that will be acceptable.
- Good time managers do not allocate their time to those who “demand” it, but rather, to those who “deserve” it.
- The most powerful word in our Time Management vocabulary is “no”.
- 1 hour of planning will save 10 hours of doing.
- Hiring a college student to do routine tasks (grocery shopping, yard work, household chores, etc.) will create as much as 20 hours per week for the average person to devote to more productive uses.
- The average person today (1999) receives more information on a daily basis than the average person received in a lifetime in 1900.
- We retain 10% of what we read. We retain 20% of what we hear. We retain 30% of what we see. We retain 50% of what we hear and see. We retain 70% of what we say. We retain 90% of what we do.
- Half of what is known today, we did not know 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the last 10 years. And it is said to be doubling again every 18 months.
While I Swim at Home, Our Combatants Fight On
by Ben Stein (from NewsMax Magazine June 2008, Pg. 34)
THERE IS A MAGNIFICENT SCENE IN BLADE RUNNER, MY FAVORITE postwar movie, in which Rutger Hauer, who plays a replicant, a human-looking robot, prepares to die. He tells his possibly human pursuer, Harrison Ford, that he has seen amazing things in his short life far out in outer space, and then he folds himself up and says, "Time to die."
As I get older, at a breakneck pace, I often think of the most beautiful, magnificent sights I have seen. The night sky in Santa Cruz, California, where I lay on a picnic bench and watched more stars than I had ever seen. It was a perfect moment of peace. I think of the Upper Priest Lake in Bonner County, Idaho, a lake three miles long, totally as nature made it eons ago, surrounded by forests and mountains, the Canada border a stone's throw away, immense eagles soaring overhead, with only one other guest, a young man windsurfing along the placid waters. And people say there is no God?
Then I think of my German Shorthaired Pointers lying in each others' paws as they sleep on the bed next to me. And I think of my saintly wife, with her perfect profile, reading in bed next to me, and I think of how lucky I was to find my soul's perfect companions -- my wife and my hounds.
But there is something I find even more amazing, even more moving: the sights of young men and women in the uniforms of the United States military, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, the Coast Guard, the Reserves, and the Guard. It isn't just that they look great in their uniforms and their tall, straight posture.
No, what is amazing to me, and a spectacular sight, is that these are human beings with the same wishes and dreams for a long, peaceful, fulfilled life as you and I have. But they have offered up their young lives and their bodies and their health and their peace of mind and their very sanity -- and that of their families -- to go out and fight for my worthless, selfish life and comfort.
I sit at home. I swim in my pool. I play with my dogs. I make fresh Alaskan salmon for my wife on the grill. Then I check my stocks and then I go to sleep with the loves of my life as the air conditioning and the electric blanket and the mattress keep me perfectly comfortable.
They -- the military in combat -- sleep in ditches if they can sleep at all. They get their legs blown off. They have permanent brain damage. They go to eternity before their time. They live with the fear of torture if they are captured by the terrorists. They leave their children behind. They miss years at a time of their babies growing up. Their wives -- the true backbone of the nation -- keep the family together while the soldiers keep the perimeter of terror far from our hearths.
And for this, they are paid modest wages, at best. They lose their families all too often. They live in extreme discomfort. They are treated like commodities to be moved on a chessboard of global struggle.
Imagine, just imagine, what it is like to be in combat! Imagine the smartest people on the planet, the Germans and the Japanese, armed with the best weapons man can devise, trying to kill our fathers and grandfathers while they struggled in mud and snow and hail and freezing rain. And then the war ends and we drive in cars with tail fins, and they who once tossed grenades at Japanese pillboxes now coach the high-school tennis team, and combat is just a nightmare. Imagine that while we complain about the stock market and how expensive gasoline is, they fight it out with terrorists who use retarded children as suicide bombers and have no such thing as conscience.
Then they come home and see that there is no mention of them in the news, that the media cares only about deranged movie stars and recording artists and how much people weigh. They, the soldiers, marines, sailors, pilots, guard, Coast Guard, reserves, are invisible and alone.
Then, the combat stars go back to fight again, and we continue to worry about interest rates.
God help us. God bless them, the thin pillars on which all of mankind's tomorrows' hopes rest, the most glorious sight on heaven and earth. They should be the first thoughts in our prayers every moment of every day. They are the real miracles.
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I've been thinking about the concept of "triage" a lot lately.
I understand that being a borderline hypochondriac doesn't exactly qualify me to talk about triage as a medical concept, but I think as a more general idea, the concept of triage has a lot to offer. Allow me to explain...
Wikipedia, the most reliable source of information in the world, defines "triage" as:
I also understand it because, frankly, triage is hard. It's hard to try to take a more objective stance on our lives. It's a lot of work, and requires a lot of thought.
Sometimes I wonder if people think they are saving themselves trouble by coasting, by just dancing through life. It may work for awhile, but it seems to me that at some point, the gig will be up and we will have to start making decisions. (Sidenote: maybe this is the real curse of work; the fact that entropy exists and we can't just "be." Hm; something to ponder another day.) The reality I live in says that gardens need tending, cars need maintenance, flowers need to be watered, and people need to be loved; it's almost like the universe is built with a incessant obligation for interaction. There's an intrinsic cause and effect relationship built into the fabric of reality, and like it or not, I think that means us, too.
I think that we must broaden our personal skill base in order to include the art of triage. Prioritizing is one of the essential functions we perform as humans, because it the sister of "choice." We cannot make decisions without prioritizing them, but that is exactly what many of us try to do. We have become chronic avoiders, letting life slap us in the face as we walk through. We think that we are somehow saving ourselves trouble by evading personal triage, but in fact, we are killing ourselves.
The truth is that for the good of our humanity we must learn the art of triage, or we will never be fully human.
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A process of prioritizing patients based on the severity of their condition so as to treat as many as possible when resources are insufficient for all to be treated immediately. The term comes from the French verb trier, meaning 'to sort, sift or select.'Doctors use this concept to sort through their "work", so to speak, to accurately prioritize what should be happening now, and what should not. This strikes me as a key life concept. What if we were to broaden the idea of triage into a more general frame? I am becoming more and more convinced that, to be truly effective human beings, we must constantly be in a state of awareness, in a position to persistently perform triage on our own lives, to prioritize and systematically assess what we're doing with the time we have. We all get the same amount of time every day (roughly 24 hours, last I checked), but for some reason, some folks we meet are highly successful -- however we choose to define the term -- and some are not. Why? People that aren't cutting it suck at triage. For some reason (or many reasons) these people can't sort through the myriad details of their lives to be able to separate events and prioritize things. They are either frighteningly lost in the complexity of life or they choose to ignore the fact that they have some control over their impending future. Part of this I can understand; it is easy to get stuck on autopilot in life, to sail through without ever really taking a look at what we're doing or where we're going. But the simple and often devastating fact is that what we're doing is going to take us somewhere -- and it may not be where we want to go.
I also understand it because, frankly, triage is hard. It's hard to try to take a more objective stance on our lives. It's a lot of work, and requires a lot of thought.
Sometimes I wonder if people think they are saving themselves trouble by coasting, by just dancing through life. It may work for awhile, but it seems to me that at some point, the gig will be up and we will have to start making decisions. (Sidenote: maybe this is the real curse of work; the fact that entropy exists and we can't just "be." Hm; something to ponder another day.) The reality I live in says that gardens need tending, cars need maintenance, flowers need to be watered, and people need to be loved; it's almost like the universe is built with a incessant obligation for interaction. There's an intrinsic cause and effect relationship built into the fabric of reality, and like it or not, I think that means us, too.
I think that we must broaden our personal skill base in order to include the art of triage. Prioritizing is one of the essential functions we perform as humans, because it the sister of "choice." We cannot make decisions without prioritizing them, but that is exactly what many of us try to do. We have become chronic avoiders, letting life slap us in the face as we walk through. We think that we are somehow saving ourselves trouble by evading personal triage, but in fact, we are killing ourselves.
The truth is that for the good of our humanity we must learn the art of triage, or we will never be fully human.
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