Saturday, November 24, 2012

THE WORLD IS CHARGED . . .

I finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's OUTLIERS yesterday and it has been on my mind.  I thought the first part, Opportunity, was fascinating.  It was life affirming in a way, the idea that there are very good reasons for personal success and they can be researched and explained. In addition to being a genius, Bill Gates was born the same year that something like 80% of tech wizard/entrepreneur's were born, the same year Steve Jobs was born.  The time was right, just like it was right when an equally high percentage of industrial tycoons were born within three or four years of each other.  The explanation for all this is compelling and impossible to ignore.

The vast majority of professional hockey players are born in January, February, or March because January 1 is the cut-off date for determining age group in Canadian youth hockey.  A twelve year old born January 2 is eleven months ahead developmentally of a twelve year old born on Christmas Eve. As a result, they get more attention, get asked to camps where they play with other stars, etc.  The same is true of other sports.

So the first part of the book does a great job of talking about individuals, but it also leaves a few important conclusions about the importance of Opportunity.

-HARD WORK.  Even though Gladwell is pointing out how the "stars align" somehow to provide opportunity, the bottom line is still an individual with a fanatical devotion to work, an individual with passion.

-OPPORTUNITY ONLY KNOCKS ONCE (or twice?).  The thing is, Bill Gates was in the right place at the right time (See book for explanation).  The Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Mellons, et. al. were similarly well situated, opportunity wise.  There were probably other Bill Gates and Steve Jobs out there who were born eight years too early, or too late.  More on that later.

-THE TEN THOUSAND HOUR RULE.  I love this.  All of the "geniuses/entrepreneurs" Gladwell has chronicled have one thing in common.  They all put in at least 10,000 hours of practice, time on task, rehearsal, whatever you want to call it.  John Lennon and Paul McCartney spent that much time playing eight hours a day, seven days a week for two years in Germany, polishing their craft.  The Beatles came out of that.  Bill Gates spent 10,000 staring at a computer screen before he got out of high school.  Invariably, all people who are great at something put in that time.

-WELL CHOSEN PARENTS.  I read something about musical talent a few years ago that I've always kept with me.  If you look at a musical prodigy, one of those 12 year old wizards you see on television who plays some amazing thing on the piano and then gets up and gives the audience a big "aw shucks" smile, bows awkwardly, and then waits to be congratulated by the host.  Sure, the kid has talent, but he also had parents who nagged him about practice, who perhaps borrowed money to pay for lessons and a suitable piano, who drove him to practice, waited around, and then drove him home, who made it to every boring recital where the beginning guitars led the program, who advocated for him at every opportunity, who cried every time they heard him play, who probably ended up driving the poor kid crazy.

The second part, Legacy, I found less satisfying.  It is basically making the same points listed above, but this time through the spectrum of heritage.  Why is it that asian people grasp math more easily than others?  What is it about the European origins of folks in the South that make them more likely to have feuds than folks from the North?  Why do you suppose European Jews were more apt to be shop owners and merchants than land owners when they migrated to America?  Etc. Etc.

The big idea I take away from the second part of this wonderful book is that if we would just be more mindful of Legacy, restructure, or refit, our institutions to take advantage of those differences, our world would become a fecund wonderland of innovation and entrepreneurship.  Imagine, Gladwell asks, how many other Bill Gates, or Lennon and McCartneys, or Cornelius Vanderbilts there are who have for whatever reason missed out on Opportunity?

Here is where this whole thing becomes fascinating.  Would the world really want to have more Bill Gates and Cornelius Vanderbilts running around looking for something to define, some niche to make, some market to conquer, some intriguing problem to solve?  Do you think there are enough big ideas to go around?  If we have the equivalent of the tech boom in California every five years, what happens to the previous tech boom, and the one before that?  I'm not sure our national blood pressure would stay at acceptable levels.

It is a cool idea though.  First of all, exactly how many Bill Gates are there out there unaccounted for?  Is there a new one born every year?  Five years?  Ten years?  Once a generation?  And second, are we living in a world whose atmosphere is charged with untapped breakthroughs?  Gerard Manley Hopkins where are you when we need you?

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Becoming Thankful & Why I Love Lizbeth Salandar


Katherine today.

For the last 38 years I've been making stuffing this time on Thanksgiving morning.   For a lot of those years I've been listening for Franny noises that have been intentionally timed, by me, to lure her with the smells of sausage browning for that stuffing (always her favorite Thanksgiving food) so she would come to the kitchen and cook with me in between the yearly attempts Jim made to keep the kitchen clean during this process.  In recent years there were Bloody Marys and Ken too.  Nate is never here on Thanksgiving and Chris's family has so many families to take care of, we see them when the stars align and the stars have been pretty generous until this year.

We usually feed anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five folks.  We like it.  It's our best holiday because it highlights what we love to do.  Zack, grandson, told me while I was driving him to high school last week (I keep aging before my very eyes) that he would miss our food this year.  He really likes our food.  He knows how to get Granny's attention.  He will get a turkey dinner for his birthday in February.

This year everyone went elsewhere for wonderful reasons.  So there's us and there's my mom.

There were other complications.  Our twenty year old stove was beginning to behave like the old tiger in We Bought A Zoo--it was time to put it out of its misery.  The convection function of the oven died at Thanksgiving last year and baking anything longer than 30 minutes was a crapshoot.  We finally got our act together and actually looked at and purchased a new stove.  Cool.  The model we wanted had to be specially ordered, of course, and they would shoot for delivery before Thanksgiving.  Not so cool.

The freezer part of the fridge failed next.  It was thirty years old.  We bought it when we got this house.  I had an exciting afternoon dreaming of ice makers and those cool insets in the doors of other people's refrigerators where water and ice cubes and crushed ice can be dispensed without the inconvenience of opening doors.  The anticipated existential crisis over choosing a  drinking water approach several times a day was almost tingly to me. Then we went appliance shopping and realized we could downsize our size thinking when it came to a fridge and get one that would not require lots of cabinet remodeling along with the purchase of a new fridge.  We found ourselves an old fashioned fridge with a plain freezer on the top.  It's stainless like the rest of the stuff, but its small and it fits in the space we have.  It was, however, not available and had to be ordered.  They would shoot for delivery before Thanksgiving.  Counting on appliances for Thanksgiving was not a happening thing.

The gods had sent their message.  Take the year off.  Take your mom to a restaurant.  She likes restaurants.  We're going to The Fort.  I just hope it doesn't feel like the Christmas morning we were in the San Diego airport.  That was bad.  Right now this is pretty strange, but there's a lot of good right now and it's time to settle into becoming thankful.

As always, a list:

1.  Jim.  For Everything.  For making an old lady like me feel like a girl, for baking me a pumpkin pie later today, for introducing me to opera (La Traviata is playing in the background), for starting the new Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table downstairs reviving an old tradition when the kids were here, for just everything.

2.  For the kids and grandkids.  For the good friends we have.

3.  For the French Dip sandwich at Lou's Food Bar, the steamed pork belly buns at Bones, and Park Burgers.

4.  For Saturday mornings at Snooze.

5.  For the porch of our cabin up in the Tetons, my bliss station.

6.  For my Teton friends all over the country who are called to that part of the world and Jenny Lake Lodge and have some sort of esprit de corps about the place.  I want to remember that no matter what, it's those mountains and bathing in the woods that make me whole each year.  The goal is to get there more, not less.

7.  For the delivery of the stove and fridge last Thursday.

8.  For Jim and Bud getting the sink in on Tuesday.  It took all day and quite the bluster of swearing, but it's in.  It doesn't leak.  The garbage disposal works.  It looks cool.  The water pressure is amazing.  I love the sink.

9.  Oddly, for Lizbeth Salandar.  I've been through two bouts of the flu since my flu shot.  Jim and I both missed getting outside our hotel room in Chicago with a flu.  We went through it again, or something horribly similar, a week after we got home at the end of our week with Chris's kids.  Lizbeth Salandar got me through the second bout.

They've been replaying The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on cable a lot recently and as I've tried to sleep (it's really hard to do when running to bathroom), I've had the movie on.  I loved the books with Lizbeth, but I've had some real time to think about her in my flu-ridden state.

Lizbeth represents many things I abhor and yet I love her.  She is guided by justice and revenge and I've spent my life trying to move myself over to the mercy side of the duality.  She takes care of lot of buried vengeance about my own loss of innocence.

She is brilliant and can glance at things and know them.  She loves research and I don't.  I have a lot to say about education, but the kind of research needed to say it stops me easily.  Jim loves it.  I am a fictional girl.

Lizbeth breaks little and big rules.  She kills people on the big side of things and she ignores no smoking requests even from Mikael on the smaller side of things.  She doesn't worry about these choices.  She thinks it's absurd to feel guilty about smoking--it is a need to her.  It's interesting that she asks Mikael permission to kill Martin Vanger.  Why does she ask this time?

Enough.  I shouldn't like her.  I do.  I'm grateful there's a fictional girl out there killing my boogiemen.

10.  I am thankful for the upcoming trip to the New York City in April to see Nate and Ashley, to go Metropolitan Opera, to go on one of Nate's food tours, to meet up with Franny's family there too.

11.  For my country and its people.  For being in Chicago, and healthy that one day, this election day and in the hotel where the President was living through it all.  I rode down the elevator for 27 floors with David Axelrod and he remembered Franny and I had such a wonderful Mom moment.  We took Willa for a sushi lunch (our first real outing--we made it to the hotel lobby) and met Franny's White House cohorts.  Wonderful.

12.  For Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.  Lots of wonderful tidbits that I don't seem to let go of--a fun and interesting and scientific read.

12.  For Daniel Martin by John Fowles.  My fifth reading and third copy.  The first was a problematic paperback.  The print was too small and the last fifteen pages were missing.  I bought a used hardback and left it in Chicago.  I found another hardback in the basement that we thought we'd given away years ago.  I may finish this reading by May.  I love this book though.  It's the Huck Finn of my old age I guess.

13.  For knitting.  For my own bed.  For my TV and all the stupid stuff I watch.

14.  For being here.  For being alive.  I put up with a lot of physical stuff because of radiation.  I complain too much.  It's good to be here.  I'm so incredibly lucky and thankful.

Everybody have a good day.  Have a whole lot of good days.