I am currently working on my 10k hours as a writer. I’m confident I will get good at it someday.

But like Gladwell writes, it wasn’t because we were stupendous. We just had a combination of things – supportive parents, enough money to travel, a good coach, some talent and a lot of hard work.

I am going to see how I can get my 10,000 hours in on something else now -

I went to college with many people from the greater Harlan area… it is a very different society and was an eye opening change from suburban Cleveland / Akron area.

I didn’t realize that flush toilets were still a sign of wealth or that methane in a water supply could be seen as just the cost of living with an oil well in the back yard that taps through the water supply.

I try and remember the people and conditions everywhere I go.

In contrast, my big joke with Blink was I read the back cover and knew all I needed to know. (Okay, it’s a geeky joke!)

Did Gladwell cover himself in the book? He’s quite an outlier himself these days…

–snip–
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work…
Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends….
Many great athletes are legendary for the brutal discipline of their practice routines….

–snip–

Trent, you should check out this Frontline documentary if you’re interested in how culture and society affects success. :) It’s a doc on an experiment a teacher did it her students in which she had one group of kids assigned as the “better group” and another group as the underdogs. It’s crazy to see how fast their behaviors change. More surprisingly is how adults acted in the same experiment.

Two of your articles are posted in today’s online webportal @ WSJ personal finance section toward bottom right section.

Also, you’re mixing up reading and writing with speaking and understanding and then compairing it to learning math. Learning to read and write, even at a basic level, is not particularly easy and takes plenty of time and practice as well (which you will soon learn with your five year old :-). Even ripping off this short note is an example of likely grammatical and spelling mistakes, which most folks overlook since we “get” the intent and the point of the communication and it’s really not worth our time to point out others errors on a blog comment.

That is, why aren’t we all brilliant in math?

Math has ten numbers, 0 through 9 that are combined in a strict pattern. Math rules are totally regular and can be expressed in formulas.

In contrast, the English language has 26 letters, some of which have the same sound, others of which can sound different when they appear twice in the same word (i.e. the “g”s in “garage”), silent letters, dipthongs, homonyms, irregular verbs, etc. In particular, the “ough” letter combination is pronounced differently in the words through, though, plough and trough. Yet my 5 year old speaks English quite fluently!

So why do we generally have so much trouble with math? It really should be as easy as falling off a log, at least compared to speaking English (never mind spelling it).

In your three take aways, you say, “raise my children in an environment that encourages learning and creativity” – This is why homeschooling is so successful.

First, Asian schools still practice the old fashioned art of drills. You have to know your multiplication tables, cold, so you don’t have to worry about the basic calculations when you’re working with higher math. I was furious when my son’s fourth grade teacher required her students to buy calculators!

Second, Asian parents push their children very hard in their academics. My Japanese exchange sister and all her classmates went to “cram school” for three hours after school every day, and Saturday mornings, when our kids would be doing sports or other activities. They practiced and practiced and practiced to be prepared to take the examinations that select which students get to go to high school and on to college, and which students are sent from 9th grade to trade school. You only get one shot at that test. (Which is another reason it’s not fair to compare American high school students overall to students where high school is competitive, as in Asian and Europe. We’re not comparing apples to apples, because we send everyone to high school.

Third, in Japan, at least, the school year is 220 days and the American school year is 180 days. Over twelve years of school, that amounts to about another year of instruction, as well as shorter summers to forget things in.

I’m not necessarily saying their way is better. They learn a lot and memorize huge quantities of information, but it is arguable that American youth have more opportunities to develop creativity, because they aren’t studying so hard. I still insisted my son drill on his math facts at home, though.