One day I was breastfeeding River at Sunset Point Park and a lady sat down beside me. We started chatting and she mentioned that her son was sad because he just found out he didn't make the hockey team.
"Is his birthday November or December?" I ask
"November. How did you possibly know that?" she asked
(Magician? Nope: Statistician.) I tell her to read Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers".
Wanna know about the "Mathew Effect" that cuts those late-in-the-year birthdays out of the running for future athletic stardom???
What Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, and Eric Schmidt have in common?
How about John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, Henry Rogers, J.P. Morgan, etc.???
The answer is the luck of a cohort and the choice to seize a special opportunity they were given.
Luck has a lot to do with being born at just the right time, in just the right place. It extends to being raised with a sense of entitlement: the concerted cultivation that gives rise to traits like the courage to question authority.
It is my sincere desire that anyone with access to my words can find something useful in them to grab on to.
Maybe you didn't have the luck & luxury of attending a private school with access to one of the worlds earliest computing machines. Maybe you weren't enrolled in violin lessons at age 6. Maybe.... (write your own excuse here): _________________________________________________________
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| this is, legit, my all time favorite quote. |
You do have the luck and luxury of being able to chose differently at any point in time about the things in your life that aren't working.
Start focusing on opportunities.
In high school I coached kids soccer. One gentleman I volunteered with owned a greenhouse business. (in addition to his full time job) "Why greenhouses?" I asked.
"We were just traveling in Europe and found this great price on glass" he said. "I saw an opportunity, so I took it."
From that moment on I was always looking for great business opportunities. I see lots of them. Everywhere. Constantly. All the time. I get job offers constantly. (Smile and say Hello to people! You will be amazed at what happens.) A man this past Friday asked if I wanted to work for him & learn how to be a Crane Operator (I'm not going to take that job, by the way, but I did interview him for the Pirates Magazine. Fascinating fellow.)
Something I hear a lot from Great Aunt Hildegard's generation is "in my day, we had to work hard just to put food on the table."
I have so much reverence for How Hard Our Great Aunt Hildegard's worked! so instead of saying "yeah, well, in our day, we have to work hard to clean up the enormous mess we all made, 'cause it's poisoning the food."
We can admit that it's time to shift our thinking and create a responsible world economy.
Adam Poswolsky says it with more eloquence:
"You can call us idealistic, but:
We are not the "Me! Me! Me!" generation.
We are the Purpose Generation. And we will be engaged with our work because we have to.
The challenges facing our generation are simply too serious to ignore."
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Isn't that beautiful?!
I'm noticing minimalism is one of the hottest topics these days. It's because we are all beginning to realize... All the money we could hope to "make" can't be traded for the value that authentic community brings. We can easily give our kids the cash to purchase any object of distraction. That money will even pay for antidepressants when the novelty of distractions wear off. All the money we could ever hand them, however, won't buy them the skills to form the loving bonds that will give meaning to thier lives, or buy back thier health once they've lost it.
The cohorts in Gladwell's Outliers were born in narrow slices of optimal time periods of history: old enough to be able to take advantage of a budding new era, but young enough that their mind-set hadn't been jaded by the obsolete mentality of the previous.
We are not the "Me! Me! Me!" generation.
We are the Purpose Generation. And we will be engaged with our work because we have to.
The challenges facing our generation are simply too serious to ignore."
_________________________________________________________________________________
Isn't that beautiful?!
I'm noticing minimalism is one of the hottest topics these days. It's because we are all beginning to realize... All the money we could hope to "make" can't be traded for the value that authentic community brings. We can easily give our kids the cash to purchase any object of distraction. That money will even pay for antidepressants when the novelty of distractions wear off. All the money we could ever hand them, however, won't buy them the skills to form the loving bonds that will give meaning to thier lives, or buy back thier health once they've lost it.
The cohorts in Gladwell's Outliers were born in narrow slices of optimal time periods of history: old enough to be able to take advantage of a budding new era, but young enough that their mind-set hadn't been jaded by the obsolete mentality of the previous.
There is no lack of opportunity in this world, only a lack of determined spirit.
We shall teach our children to create value, and they will always be rich.
This entire essay summarized in a song:
We shall teach our children to create value, and they will always be rich.
This entire essay summarized in a song:
This entire essay summarized in a quote:
The Roseto Effect:
More on the Roseto Effect:
