Summer School

"Alexander's work suggests that the way in which education has been discussed in the U.S. is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding - all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But data shows that schools do work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.

The causes of Asian math superiority become even more obvious. Students in Asian schools don't have long summer vacations. Why would they? Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer. The school year in the U.S. is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long." - Malcolm Gladwell

There are ups and downs to be had with the type of transformation discussed there. The point that interests me is the reaffirmation that success in multiple areas, whether music or play or learning, comes in proportion to work.

Heroic Meekness

"One thing I personally try to do is, I try to put myself a little down. I say to my copilots, 'I don't fly very often. Three or four times a month. You fly a lot more. If you see me doing something stupid, it's because I don't fly very often. So tell me. Help me out.' Hopefully, that helps them speak up." - Suren Ratwatte, veteran pilot

Ratwatte was reflecting on a plane crash that had occurred because of a lack of communication, due to a culture with extreme deference or shyness to speak out to a superior officer. That's what happens when co-workers or family members sense an excess of judgment, closed-mindedness, or invulnerability - crashes. We're humans, and we flourish when we act like them.

A Hard Day's Night

"We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing." - John Lennon

Since millions of Americans work eight hour days (and then some) on a regular basis, I'll bet it takes more than mere time to create greatness. It's that passion - that heart and soul as Lennon put it - that pushes the practitioners to new heights. Greatness waiting for us is tied to our natural passion... the type of thing we can do for hours without realizing it, and without much if any flagging of our creativity and enthusiasm.

It'll All Work Out

"Research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder." - Malcolm Gladwell

10,000 hours to be quantitative. Or four hours per weeknight for ten years!

Good People, Low Pressure, Long Life

The death rate in the tiny Italian immigrant town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was 30 to 35 percent lower than the rest of the population across all major causes of death. Why, researchers wondered?

"They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on that particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures... [T]he Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world." - Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell also put it well that "the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."