Coming out of two years of school and other consuming endeavors has been akin to clearing an arterial blockage; everything rushes ahead faster than ever, compelled by physical law to catch up with the gears that never stopped turning. The two years that I spent reading textbooks (or not - at the least, I was mentally attending to classroom concepts) blocked out mental space that I would have otherwise loaned to nonfiction reading on subjects of interest to me (the one that did consistently get through was investing). I recently breezed through Creation: Life and How to Make It, and I believe that it has begged that I traverse at least two other books - Consciousness: An Introduction, as well as Prey, the Michael Crichton novel. While the first book may seem like a natural progression, I am aware that the second may not; however, Prey is the story of a Steve Grand-style artificial intelligence. It is actually Consciousness that is out of place here.
I also recently read A Widow for One Year, which like Owen Meany, I took more pleasure in reading than in finishing. Irving's narrative momentum works wonders on my mind and his characters are always very true. I think that The Hotel New Hampshire is next.
I am also finishing up Desert Solitaire, which is something like Walden for the Southwest U.S., though composed of the more colorful (and questionable) morality of the Cowboy, which is appropriate to the setting, in a sense.
Ordering Malcolm Gladwell's other books - notably, What the Dog Saw and The Tipping Point was also an easy choice after reading Outliers. He is an author that I am kicking myself for not reading sooner.
If the summer is boring it will be my own fault.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
The Actions of an Outlier
I have been reading the book, "Outliers: The Story of Success", by Malcolm Gladwell, before and during my trip to North Carolina. Flawed, intelligent, driven people can feed themselves with a steady stream of ideas and let their predispositions towards self-improvement do the rest. This is one of my graces.
The book could be called, "Success De-mystified", and it would be quite apt. Gladwell cites vivid examples that illustrate fallacies in our concepts of what makes people successful (or failures). Social entitlement, cultural power distance, and demographics can all play overriding roles in success, as he shows. Intelligence, ambition, and determination are important, but they pale next to these environmental constants, which simply overwhelm us. The best-laid plans of mice and men, indeed. Maybe we should all be reading more Cormac McCarthy.
Thus far, it is social entitlement that keeps hold even when I put the book down. I identified immediately which of Gladwell's groups I fell into in this regard - the group that does not feel the innate entitlement to ask things of other people and thus utilize social knowledge to my own advantage. Gravely, Gladwell shows just how crippling this deficiency is when he illustrates the differences in college experiences between Chris Langan (with the highest IQ ever measured - around 200) and Oppenheimer, the scientist who would lead the group that developed the atomic bomb. Langan repeatedly failed to get second-rate colleges to grant him the slightest freedoms, such as to accomodate the fact that his family had no car and he had to commute a long distance; meanwhile, Oppenheimer was merely put on probation for attempting to fatally poison one of his professors. Later, Oppenheimer charmed his way into the head position of the team to create the atomic bomb. Such examples are illustrative of the difference between two philosophies of sucess: 1) that we should strive to grab what we can get; and 2) that we will be rewarded naturally with what we deserve. I have always believed I will be rewarded naturally with what I deserve.
But, of course, this is true only in Disney movies. For years, I assumed that I would be rewarded with a significant other that I deserved, and for years, it didn't happen (the secondary pain of this approach is a predisposition towards assuming that the ones that DO come along must surely be better than they appear; or, perhaps I didn't even see them as they were).
The problem with more lasting significance is the fact that I do not know how to befriend people that could benefit me intellectually; the times it has happened have been incidental. For whatever reason, I tend to isolate myself intellectually, even when I admit that what I want is for intellectual loneliness to end.
The mentality of social entitlement that Gladwell describes, then, is absent; but I am intelligent, determined, and am learning my flaws. How will I build this behavior to be my own future second nature?
The book could be called, "Success De-mystified", and it would be quite apt. Gladwell cites vivid examples that illustrate fallacies in our concepts of what makes people successful (or failures). Social entitlement, cultural power distance, and demographics can all play overriding roles in success, as he shows. Intelligence, ambition, and determination are important, but they pale next to these environmental constants, which simply overwhelm us. The best-laid plans of mice and men, indeed. Maybe we should all be reading more Cormac McCarthy.
Thus far, it is social entitlement that keeps hold even when I put the book down. I identified immediately which of Gladwell's groups I fell into in this regard - the group that does not feel the innate entitlement to ask things of other people and thus utilize social knowledge to my own advantage. Gravely, Gladwell shows just how crippling this deficiency is when he illustrates the differences in college experiences between Chris Langan (with the highest IQ ever measured - around 200) and Oppenheimer, the scientist who would lead the group that developed the atomic bomb. Langan repeatedly failed to get second-rate colleges to grant him the slightest freedoms, such as to accomodate the fact that his family had no car and he had to commute a long distance; meanwhile, Oppenheimer was merely put on probation for attempting to fatally poison one of his professors. Later, Oppenheimer charmed his way into the head position of the team to create the atomic bomb. Such examples are illustrative of the difference between two philosophies of sucess: 1) that we should strive to grab what we can get; and 2) that we will be rewarded naturally with what we deserve. I have always believed I will be rewarded naturally with what I deserve.
But, of course, this is true only in Disney movies. For years, I assumed that I would be rewarded with a significant other that I deserved, and for years, it didn't happen (the secondary pain of this approach is a predisposition towards assuming that the ones that DO come along must surely be better than they appear; or, perhaps I didn't even see them as they were).
The problem with more lasting significance is the fact that I do not know how to befriend people that could benefit me intellectually; the times it has happened have been incidental. For whatever reason, I tend to isolate myself intellectually, even when I admit that what I want is for intellectual loneliness to end.
The mentality of social entitlement that Gladwell describes, then, is absent; but I am intelligent, determined, and am learning my flaws. How will I build this behavior to be my own future second nature?
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