The Writers Coin

Think of how many times you’ve said “That guy’s a genius!” or “That guy’s a natural!”

I use the first one all the time when I talk about a friend of mine I consider the smartest person I’ve ever known. I use the latter a lot when I’m watching sports, especially when you’re watching guys like Lebron James or Johan Santana.

Let’s face it, most of us are fascinated by the idea of “the genius.” This idea of a person that was born with incredible intelligence or physical ability is something we love to see.

But what’s really going on with these freaks of nature? Did they just inherit some random gene that we don’t have? Are they just lucky? Couldn’t we learn something from looking at what they’ve done and how they’ve done it?

Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is out to answer those questions, not with knee-jerk answers and speculation, but with hard data.

And the things he found out about these so-called geniuses—or Outliers as he calls them—will blow your mind.

There are a few reasons I was excited to read Outliers: first of all, I loved The Tipping Point. Also, making research and hard data interesting and writing it out in an accessible way isn’t easy, but Gladwell seems to do it with great ease.

Then there was a recent article in the New Yorker comparing teachers and quarterbacks that I thought was brilliant. I mean, who would’ve thunk to relate teachers and quarterbacks? And make it entertaining too?

Let’s face it: Gladwell is just plain interesting.

As I read through the book, I’ve been sharing the stuff inside it with everyone that will listen because there are so many interesting stories inside. So I’m going to try to highlight those interesting things without totally ruining the book for those that want to read it themselves.

Gladwell opens the book by telling us what he’s setting out to do, and that’s explain how success happens. He’s basically taking a shot at the whole myth of the self-made man, of the genius. According to Gladwell, there is no such thing as a person who rose from nothing and did it all by himself.

By using real-world examples and backing it all up with hard data, Gladwell sets out to prove that there is no such thing as genius as we typically think of it. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, and he goes about putting his case together one quality at at a time.

According to Gladwell, it takes luck, preparation, opportunity, nature,  cultivation, and culture.

LUCK

If you had to guess what the most important quality was for a great hockey player, what would it be?

Stamina? Strength? Toughness?

Gladwell opens up the book by showing us charts of different Canadian junior league hockey-team rosters. Specifically, he wants to show us the birth dates for all those players. This is what Gladwell does: he points at something that seems insignificant and then he tells you what’s really happening behind the scenes.

It turns out most really good hockey prospects are born in January, February, or March.

The more he looked, the more Barnsley came to believe that what he was seeing was not a chance occurrence but an iron law of Canadian hockey: in any elite group of hockey players—the very best of the best—40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December.

How does Gladwell make sense of this data? In his words, “The explanation for this is quite simple.” It’s about the cutoff date that separates players from the different age brackets. The cutoff date in Canadian hockey is January 1. So if you’re 10 years old and born in January, you could be playing with kids that won’t turn 10 until the end of the year.

That means the odds of you being stronger, faster, and tougher are pretty high.

The Canadian hockey players born in January, February, and March all have a huge advantage. An advantage over their peers that will compound and grow bigger as time goes on. This advantage, however, is born purely from luck—nothing more.

But there’s more to being a success than luck—you also have to prepare to put yourself in a position to take advantage of any luck that might come your way. And that’s where preparation comes into play.

PREPARATION

We talkin’ about practice? Yes Allan, we’re talking about practice. Gladwell devotes a whole chapter to the idea of practice and the research keeps churning out one magical number: 10,000. As in 10,000 hours of practice.

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything.” —Neurologist Daniel Levitin

According to the research, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a “world-class expert” at something, anything. I guess now we know why Allan Iverson is so upset in his rant about practice—he’s more than likely already put in his 10,000 hours. So we’ll forgive him for that little rant.

Gladwell gives us examples of people like Mozart, Bill Gates, and Bill Joy, but my favorite one is the one about the Beatles.

Turns out one of the most important places in the history of the Beatles isn’t Strawberry Fields or London, it’s Hamburg. Way before they became superstars, back in 1960, they got a gig in Hamburg that had nothing glamorous about it. It was basically playing at a glorified strip club filled with drunks and perverts. Not your idea of a place where geniuses hang out, now is it?

But they played for up to five hours at a time, seven days a week.

All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.

Gladwell isn’t saying the Beatles had no talent or special skills—far from it. He’s simply showing us the huge advantage they had over other bands by the time they came stateside—in Hamburg alone they had already gotten in their 10,000 hours. The US had no chance but to surrender to Beatle-mania—they may have been new on the scene, but they were already grizzled veterans.

Think about that number for a second: 10,000 hours. It got me thinking about myself, and I think you should do the same. What’s the one thing you practiced longer than anything else since you were a kid? Maybe it was a musical instrument or maybe it was a sport.

For me, it was baseball. I started practicing when I was 7, but I was terrible. So when I was 8 I began practicing five days a week, for two and a half hours every day. From when I was seven to when I was seventeen, the one thing I did more than anything else in my life was practice and play baseball. I played for the Guatemalan National team in Japan, in Panama, in Colombia, and in Mexico. When you’re on the National team, you practice a LOT. And guess what? I’m still not even close.

All told, from when I was 7 until I was 17, I managed to crank out just 4,000 hours of practice. And that was my passion—it was all I ever did or thought of. And I’m still 6,000 hours short! I guess that’s why I didn’t walk on to my college baseball team. I like to think of it as being unlucky: I wasn’t born in August (that’s the cut-off date in baseball).

How many hours can you account for on any one topic? If you’re anywhere near 10,000 hours, email me at thewriter at thewriterscoin.com because I’d love for you to be in my network (or at least give me an autograph).

The rice paddies

CULTURE

To explain the role of culture in achieving success, Gladwell decides to take a look at a very scary subject: plane crashes. Specifically, he’s looking at an accident that happened involving a Korea Air plane that went down without any panic in the cockpit.

Then he went to the tapes and analyzed what was happening—it turns out the captain was missing the signs that something was wrong but his underlings did not want to correct him or contradict him. He was, after all, the captain. So the plane crashed and they all died. All because, in Korean culture, there is an enormous respect for authority and the chain of command.

How crazy is that?

Gladwell then lines up statistics on countries that respect authority over all other things and saw a direct connection between that “respect” and airplane crashes. The cockpit becomes a death trap because no one wants to “show up” the captain.

He also brings up a stereotype about Asian people that most people wouldn’t even want to touch. Gladwell not only puts it out there…he tries to give us an explanation. One has to do with how the Chinese language deals with numbers—numbers are shorter and so it’s easier for kids to pick up. That means they start counting before we can—you could also file this away under luck.

But the real answer lies in the rice paddies of China.

Turns out there is a huge difference between farming culture as we think of it and the rice-farming culture of China. When I think of farming, I think of some grueling months of hard work followed by months of inactivity and “hibernation.” The rice paddies aren’t like that—Gladwell tells us that the average workload for a rice farmer is around 3,000 hours a year (that’s around a 50-hour workweek, 52 weeks a year, no time off…). This is the way it’s been since back in the day, so it’s become part of the culture.

But back to mathematics. Earlier on, Gladwell tells us what the three components are to finding your work satisfying: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. And it turns out rice farming has this in droves. It’s a very exact science that needs to be tweaked just right, you can do it all on your own, and every tweak you make leads to a better result. That’s why rice farmers diversify their crop—it protects them in case one of them doesn’t do as well. Even in the rice paddies, Chinese kids are learning a lesson in portfolio diversification!

NATURE

According to Gladwell, once you’ve put in the work and had a little bit of luck go your way, you still to get a chance. The Beatles had Hamburg, the lawyer he uses as an example—Joe Flom—got his opportunity by being excluded because he was Jewish. But that turned out to be the break he needed.

Then you have a man Gladwell spends a lot of time on: Chris Langan. Langan might be the smartest person in the world—his IQ  is between 195 and 210. According to that number, he’s “smarter” that Albert Einstein. But he isn’t a stuffy professor that looks like a Star Trek nerd. Nope—Chris Langan was a bouncer at a bar and loves lifting weights.

There are more clips on Chris Langan over on YouTube.

Gladwell’s point about Chris Langan isn’t that he’s a failed genius, it’s that he wasn’t given the tools he needed to fully exploit his genius. He can’t relate to people very well and that’s what has kept him on the outside looking in his whole life. He was lucky, in a way, but he wasn’t given the tools he needed to interact with other people so his genius could be fully enjoyed.

The author

NOW WHAT?

I’ve only scratched the surface of all the interesting stuff Gladwell talks about. He goes on to explain how education can be fixes without buying fancy computers or hiring “better” teachers, but by having students spend more time at school instead of going on summer vacation. He analyzes the KIPP-style of school to make his point, and by the end of it you’ll be convinced he’s onto something.

But after he shows you how all these dots are connected in these very surprising, very interesting ways, you start to wonder: how can we use this information to give more people a chance? To try to “give” more people the chance at luck and preparation? He briefly mentions this and, really, it’s not this book’s job to go into any depth on it. But I would’ve liked more.

Hopefully someone will use this book as a model to create better ways to educate kids and give them all a better chance at being successful.

Until then, Gladwell has done an incredible job of writing something that informs, entertains, and creates a platform on how the world can become a better place.

Not too shabby, Malcolm, not too shabby.

So I finally read the “new” biography on Warren Buffett—The Snowball—all 838 pages of it. Why would I wade through that many pages to read about some guy that  picks stocks? Well, because he’s probably the greatest investor any of us has ever seen.

That and another book: Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. That book was my “intro” to Buffett—it’s a fantastic book that gives you a great idea of what the man is like and how his mind works.

But if Buffett is the appetizer, The Snowball is the main course. Not only because it’s the first authorized biography on the Oracle of Omaha, but because it goes into great detail on all of the topics that the first book touched on.

A LOT of detail. Like all the crazy, Tom Sawyer schemes Buffett and his friends had to make money when they were young. It’s a fun read, though there were topics that I thought were just “kind of interesting,” and the details on those kind of slowed the read down a little.

I already gave a preview of the book and discussed Buffett’s opinion on the estate tax (or death tax).

So instead of going chapter for chapter, which would take a few thousand words, I’m just going to highlight some of the most interesting parts of the book. As Ramit would say, “things you would talk about at a cocktail party.”

So if you can’t make your way through this tome of all things Buffett, here are some good nuggets, as per my opinion:

• After staying away from foreign stocks for pretty much his whole life, Buffett discovers Korean stocks in 2004. Since they have a totally different accounting system over there, he had to teach himself that new system. Which he did. And then he mastered it and started scooping up cheap companies.
• When he announced he would be leaving all of his money without leaving behind a Warren Buffett foundation or a hospital/university wing named after him, it not only made history, but he set a precedent for other philanthropists about how to give their money away.
• He was famously anti-computers and anti-Internet because he couldn’t understand them. Yet he still continued to beat the market without having minute-by-minute information about the market. Why? Because Buffett invests for the long term, he doesn’t care what the market does from one day to the next, so he doesn’t need to know. But his obsession for bridge eventually got him plugged into the net: he would play online for hours at a time.
• Big pimpin’. I know, it’s weird, but Warren Buffett is/was not a traditional one-woman man. He’s got his quirks, and one of them is that he needs more than one woman in his life. The way he grew up and the way his mother treated her kids may have had something to do with it, but the end result is that he lived a life of a rapper for a little while there. Except without the excessive spending and the drugs. And the rap—there was no rap.
• The Long Term Capital Management debacle—Buffett wanted to make that deal. It’s just that no one could get a hold of him because he was trying to use a satellite phone in Yellowstone park that wasn’t working properly. So he missed the deal.
• Buffett is NOT a fan of stock options. He wants to reward those that get good results, but boards are notorious for rewarding the most mediocre performances. He also went on a crusade to change the way stock options were accounted for—they didn’t “cost” anything right away, which made the books look that much better. This cost him some relationships, since all his friends were filthy rich, and this hit them right in the gut. But he still stuck to his guns.
• In one sentence, the essence of Buffett’s success: “Buffett’s real brilliance was not just to spot bargains (though he certainly had done plenty of that) but in having created, over many years, a company that made bargains out of fairly priced businesses.”
• Check out what his buddy Charlie Munger said in 2003: “I’ll be amazed if we don’t have some kind of significant blowup in the next five to ten years.” Boom. He called it.
  
• He’s a man of routine: there’s a part in there where they explain how he eats the same lunch every day, day in and day out. When I read that part I was like “Me too!” Sad, but true.
• It’s happened many times over the course of his life: people start to question his ability to make money because “times have changed” or because “Buffett hasn’t adapted.” But every time he’s come through and his reputation has grown more and more because of it.
• He was pretty much set to retire way before he was an investing rock star, but he couldn’t stay away. An obsessive person like this? No way he could just walk away.
• The Ovarian Lottery: VERY big deal to Warren. He repeats this a lot: he was incredibly lucky to be born in the USA with the skill-set he was born with. When he was in China he was watching these men pulling tugboats and he realized that any one of them might be “smarter” or “savvier” than him, but it wouldn’t matter because they were born in a poor town with no prospects. Buffett feels incredible lucky and he hates it when people claim that they “did it on their own.” Luck is always a factor, right from the moment we come out of the womb.
• His advice to college students: “The purpose of life is to be loved by as many people as possible among those you want to have love you.” Pretty deep from a man considered to have the emotions of a robot. A robot with no emotions, that is.
• On corporate misbehaving: Buffett feels strongly about doing “the right thing” and not cheating anyone, to the point that it almost got him in trouble with a couple deals he made because the SEC couldn’t understand why he overpaid for certain deals. He claimed it was “the right thing to do,” and they wouldn’t believe that. Anyway, his philosophy on the “right” thing is to make decisions as if they were going to be plastered all over the front page the next day—everyone will find out about them. If it wouldn’t bother you to have your moves published like that, then go for it. I like that…

If you have the slightest bit of interest in knowing more about Warren Buffett, you have two choices: you read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist or you read The Snowball. If you want the Cliff Notes version, read the former, if you want every little detail and more of the recent stuff he’s done, go for the latter. Either way, you won’t be disappointed.

Under the Banner of Heaven is a book about two murders, the men behind the murders, and the reasons they had for “removing” a woman and a baby. Sound gruesome? It is, but it’s an incredibly interesting read—right up there with In Cold Blood and Manhunt.

To answer the question about why these guys killed two innocent people, and why Dan Lafferty still shows absolutely no remorse about slitting a baby’s throat, Krakauer digs deep into the history of Mormondom, its roots, and a lot of its changes over the past 170+ years.

It’s incredible that such an established religion is so young and yet so powerful. I’m not good at reviews, but here are a few things that jumped out at me about the book:

• I don’t want to get into a whole discussion about religion and my own personal beliefs about it, but I find it incredible how polygamy was basically “taken out” of mainstream Mormonism so that it could go mainstream in the US. Without that one bit of doing, it would still be considered a cult of fanatics that have no place in the country.
• There’s a really illuminating conversation that goes on between Krakauer and Dan Lafferty near the end of the book where he explains (in very clear words) how he came to believe in fundamentalism and why he is Elijah. It’s scary because this guy isn’t crazy—he’s all there. He just truly believes that he will announce the second coming of Christ. Again, this guy is not a cook and it makes the whole thing creepy. The end of this conversation has Dan Lafferty explaining the different between himself and the men behind 9/11—he’s pretty much in the same boat. He asks himself if he did the right thing that day years ago and his answer comes to him pretty quickly: yes. He felt God telling him what to do and that’s all he needs.
• Near the end there’s a chapter called Judgment in Provo that deals with the trial of Dan’s brother Ron. It’s a really fascinating look at the court system because the prosecution is trying to prove Ron isn’t crazy (or “mentally unfit to stand trial”) so he can get the death penalty. The defense wants to use that very reason to spare his life. And Ron Lafferty could care less. But some of the testimony is really compelling. What makes a man crazy? Does religious belief make a man crazy? According to the prosecution’s witnesses, if Ron was to be filed away as crazy, then anyone that believes in religion would fall under the same umbrella. A man dying on the cross and coming back to life three days later? A man walking on water and turning water to wine? Think of all the religions out there and the “bizarre” stuff that happens in their books. What the prosecution was saying was this: what Ron believes may sound weird and “out there,” and maybe it is, but it’s just his religion: Mormonism. And it’s a religion that is established, growing, and that other people believe in just as fervently. Therefore, there was no way he could be called crazy—it would set a legal precedence in the courts that anyone that believes in religion could use that as a defense. A really interesting chapter.

This is a great book. I had read Into the Wild (the movie was good too) and I liked Krakauer’s style, so this was a no brainer. I’m definitely going to check out Into Thin Air.

When I was a kid, there was a special on the History Channel about the Mongols and how they were the civilization that came closest to conquering the whole known world. Ever. I don’t remember much about it except for one thing: when the Mongol warriors got to Europe, they easily beat the Knights that were covered from head-to-toe in armor. Instead of relying on heavy protection that made them slower and more vulnerable, the Mongols were all about speed and strategy.

But the thing that stuck with me was what they wore for armor: silk shirts. Underneath their leather “armor” (only on the front, not on the back — this way if they turned their backs to the battle they were more vulnerable) they wore a silk shirt because it helped them treat arrow wounds. When an arrow hits human flesh, it causes damage upon removal — but since it won’t puncture silk, you can more easily remove the arrow head without shredding your insides.

Such a simple thing and yet it helped them vanquish the European knights pretty handily. This was all I knew about the Mongols until something perked up my interest again and I decided I had to find out more. When I saw that Mongol, a movie that was nominated for an Oscar, was out in Chicago, I had to go see it. The movie ended up being more about Genghis Khan’s early years instead of the actual building of the empire, so that’s how I came to this book.

The book takes you from the humble beginnings of a very wise man to the eventual downfall of a often misunderstood people. Everything that happens in between is incredibly compelling. The Mongol civilization under Genghis Khan was way ahead of its time in a lot of ways. For one, it espoused religious tolerance for everyone. It didn’t matter what religion you practiced as long as you first considered yourself a Mongol. After that, Genghis Khan didn’t care if you were Muslim, Jewish or Christian. He also set up a code of law that brought order to a nomadic people used to warring and thieving of women and property.

The strategies they used to conquer their enemies is especially interesting because they took everyone on a case-by-case basis. They sent some scouts ahead to see what these people looked like, how they would react, etc. Then they would apply a unique plan to beat them — it didn’t matter if they were knights covered in armor or armies holed up in a castle. The rarely lost a campaign.

I could go on and on about a lot of the little things the book mentions that really piqued my interest, but I’ll let that pass for those that want to read this book. It’s very interesting, entertaining and you’ll learn a lot about a time and people that have gotten a bad rap. Many people now equate Mongols to barbaric hordes of warriors that killed, maimed and terrorized in order to extend their grasp — not quite true. They actually had a code of morals that they followed and because Genghis Khan wasn’t really interested in taking over the world (it was mostly accidental, which is a great part of the story), he wasn’t one of those crazy, power-obsessed leaders. Anyway, I’m obviously biased. Check out the book and see for yourself.