karenika - enjoying gladwell

I am not a particularly big sports fan. Actually, I can go so far as to say I am not a sports fan in any way. I get incredibly frustrated watching football because I have a really hard time following the actual ball since it's so small compared to the players and the field. Last time I watched basketball I must have been fourteen. I have never ever watched hockey as far as I can remember. Golf is boring to me in concept let alone on TV. The only game I might be into is baseball and only in very rare cases. So it might make little sense that Jake emailed me this article by an ESPN writer.

Until you realize that he's "talking" with Malcolm Gladwell. Probably my favorite non-fiction writer of all time. I find Gladwell's writing to be consistently thought-provoking. His topics are always interesting to me. His writing is plain, unpretentious and flows beautifully. An amazingly rare accomplishment for a non-fiction writer in my albeit narrow experience. Despite the fact that most of the sports talk completely went over my head, I found some real gems in this article. Here are a few I wanted to share.

As for your (very kind) question about my writing, I'm not sure I can answer that either, except to say that I really love writing, in a totally uncomplicated way. When I was in high school, I ran track and in the beginning I thought of training as a kind of necessary evil on the way to racing. But then, the more I ran, the more I realized that what I loved was running, and it didn't much matter to me whether it came in the training form or the racing form. I feel the same way about writing. I'm happy writing anywhere and under any circumstances and in fact I'm now to the point where I'm suspicious of people who don't love what they do in the same way. I was watching golf, before Christmas, and the announcer said of Phil Mickelson that the tournament was the first time he'd picked up a golf club in five weeks. Assuming that's true, isn't that profoundly weird? How can you be one of the top two or three golfers of your generation and go five weeks without doing the thing you love? Did Mickelson also not have sex with his wife for five weeks? Did he give up chocolate for five weeks? Is this some weird golfer's version of Lent that I'm unaware of? They say that Wayne Gretzky, as a 2-year-old, would cry when the Saturday night hockey game on TV was over, because it seemed to him at that age unbearably sad that something he loved so much had to come to end, and I've always thought that was the simplest explanation for why Gretzky was Gretzky. And surely it's the explanation as well for why Mickelson will never be Tiger Woods.

and a few lines down, Simmons replies with:

On Mickelson and Sports Lent, I remember watching one of those 20/20-Dateline-type pieces about him once, and he was adamant about remaining a family man, taking breaks from golf and never letting the sport consume him ... and I remember thinking to myself, "Right now Tiger is watching this and thinking, 'I got him. Cross Phil off the list. This guy will never pass me.'" The great ones aren't just great, they enjoy what they're doing --

I find this to be completely true. If you love what you do and do it constantly, you are bound to master it eventually. And if you truly love it, can you stop doing it, even for a moment? Many writers carry little notebooks with them and take notes constantly. Photographers never leave the house without at least one camera. Musicians practice night and day. People are often surprised at the overnight success of a now famous person, but in most cases there is a multi-year effort behind the success. I can completely understand taking a break from something to recharge and relax. However, if you want to be really really fantastic at something, I think the trick is to love it obsessively. Then, it consumes you.

That's sort of why I constantly have the breadth vs depth argument with myself. If you want to do everything and are unwilling to choose one over the others, it's impossible for all your interests to consume you. You have a limited amount of time and energy and you have to make choices. Thus, it shall be that I am never going to get the opportunity to master anything until I give up on some things.

This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

This is something I've often discussed with Jake since he hates taking exams so much and makes sure not to study for them. I am never sure if he's genuinely having problems studying of he's just not trying hard enough because he's scared that if he gives it all he has and still fails, he'll have to admit he couldn't achieve despite trying as hard as possible.

I work very hard not to regret my past. I tend to get hung up on the past as is so I try regularly to make sure my decisions are as sound as they can be at the time I make them. I also give the things I do all I have. I want to be able to look back and say that there was nothing more I could have done. I used every single ounce of ability, power, and strength in my body and soul to make something happen. If, then, it still doesn't happen, it's time to move on and realize it wasn't meant to be.

That's not to say that I have followed my own advice all the time. A few years ago, I applied to Stanford Business School. My intention was to do a joint Education and Business degree and to get accepted, you had to apply to the business school first. I have always hated business school but I know Stanford is the bast and I loved the idea of this particular program. I applied to it at the same time I applied to Teach For America. I knew that if I got into both I would choose TFA. Most people might think that's stupid but TFA was what I wanted to do at the time. I figured if I couldn't get in and could get in to Stanford, I'd study Education Policy and hope to start some kind of education non-profit after I graduated. I knew TFA would get me first-hand experience and that's more useful than any education in most cases. (and in the end it turned out to be invaluable).

I had taken my GMATs four and a half years before I applied and since they are good for five years, I just used those scores. I asked for recommendations from my boss and a co-worker. I really did work hard on the essays. Overall, it's not fair to say that I didn't try but I am sure I could have tried harder to perfect my application. I am not sure if it was on purpose or sheer neglect. I knew the acceptance rate was very low and chances were that I wouldn't get in. And when I didn't get in, I kept telling myself I didn't want to get in anyway. I hadn't even bothered to retake my GMATs. It was obvious that Stanford wasn't my first choice. Which is all bullshit. I didn't get in and that's that. If I didn't try to make my application as strong as it could have been, that's sheer stupidity on my part. Why waste time writing essays, bothering to fill out an application, and taking other people's time to write recommendations if I wasn't dying to get in? I was completely retarded to not give it my best effort. And if this was my best effort, I should admit that I wasn't good enough to get in. To not try my hardest just to have some excuse to use when I don't succeed is really setting myself up for failure. Life's too short to live like that.

There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

This comment reminded me of The Wisdom of Crowds. Sometimes it's hard be objective when you know the subject too well. It's hard to not make assumptions and to not overcomplicate the situation. I guess the trick is to know when you're in that kind of situation and to seek the help of people who are less involved for those particular situation.

All interesting points, all gathered from a sports article that I wouldn't have even seen had Jake not sent it to me. Shows you that an interesting person like Gladwell is worth reading regardless of the context.

March 19, 2006 | previous | random thoughts | share[]