I’ve seen Malcolm Gladwell speak and he’s quite good. So it was with interest that I read , The secrets of Malcolm Gladwell. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I did find this last bit quite interesting. I tend to be the guy who doesn’t prepare (spontaneity is fun!), and I am believing that needs to change.

“I know it may not look like this. But it’s all scripted. I write down every word and then I learn it off by heart. I do that with all my talks and I’ve got lots of them”

…

He is not giving a speech or a lecture – he is giving a performance. And like any good actor, he knows that you have to learn your lines.

I think I’m under oath to reference Malcolm Gladwell and his (third) exchange with Bill Simmons after I’ve already told you about the first two.

I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Meh. Not a whole lot fascinating about it. A few points I thought worth writing down.

• “In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.” [currentblend co-op]
• “practical intelligence” – knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.
• autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward…the three qualities that work has to have to be satisfying.

Charlie Rose interviewed Malcolm Gladwell and discussed meaningful work. Gladwell says…

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

If you are convinced that the work you are doing is meaningful, then curiosity, there’s no cost to it. If you think there’s always got to be a connection between what you put in and what you get out, then of course you’ll run off with a great excitement after an idea that catches your idea.

Someone new to be fascinated by: Nathan Myhrvoid. Master French chef? Check. Former CTO of Microsoft? Check. Award winning photographer? Check. Monthly meetings with Malcolm Gladwell? Check. Involved with paleontological research? Check. Owner of 18 US patents? Check.

I’m sure there’s more, I’m just starting to feel bad about myself. I’m 30 and can hardly remember to change my underwear.

I’m late to the game on this one, but finally finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. Overall, it’s an interesting read (with some interesting points I’ve highlighted below), but it didn’t really revolutionize anything for me. I may have been a little too aware of the “plot” since it’s been released for a while. Here’s the link to the wired article that started it all. (If I had to to it again, I’d save yourself some time and just read the article, and not the book)

One interesting thing is my timing of finishing this book just as Anderson’s book Free has been getting some reviews. Malcolm Gladwell, Fred Wilson, Seth Godin and Mark Cuban have all weighed in on his new book.

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In the past, I’ve wondered (outloud to some friends) how difficult it would be to become a professional golfer. Before I dive in, I’ll throw some assumptions (and my golf pedigree) out there.

money is available, but in limited quantities / access to a golf course and practice facility / access to exercise facility / golf equipment is current technology / weather would allow year-round golf / I’ve played golf since I was 5 / My handicap as of September 2008 is 1.4 / I played golf in high school, but not in college

Before I tick-off the professional golfers who are serving their time on the mini-tours and struggling to get by, I’m not saying I can or ever would be able to compete on the professional level. (As an aside, I know many struggling professional golfers who are great players; with the way I currently play, there is absolutely NO WAY I can compete with them, they are that much better). I’m just asking the question, how close could I come to that competition if I took a year off and completely focused on my game?

There’s been a few attempts from people to do similar things. ESPN featured Kathryn Bertine on a two-year quest to make the Olympics (spoiler: she failed).

This also brings up something I’ve been meaning to take a closer look at: deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule. While I won’t dive into what these both are right now, expect to read more about these ideas.

[Deliberate practice]  is activity designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, whether the activity is purely intellectual, such as chess or business-related activities, or heavily physical, such as sports; and it isn’t much fun.

…

Gladwell repeatedly mentions the “10,000-Hour Rule”, claiming that the key to success in any field is simply a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of 10,000 hours.

I don’t know if this is possible, but it’s fun to think about. Like I said I know plenty of guys who are struggling on the mini-tours and can mop the floor with me on the course, so I’m highly hesitant to say it’s possible. Thoughts?

Malcom Gladwell delves into how underdogs can better compete with the favorites. While an interesting read, I pulled a couple selections that emphasize strategies that are based on very simple goals while remove all pre-existing notions and re-thinking the way things should be(have).

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

…

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

I just spent the last 25 minutes reading this exchange between Malcom Gladwell and Bill Simmons. As in the previous edition (aka, Gladwell v. Simmons I), the commentary is very entertaining and covers a lot.

Apparently, this morning Malcom Gladwell kicked off The New Yorker Summit (dying to go next year, btw) with this little gem.

What’s going on on Wall Street isn’t the result of experts failing to act as experts: it’s the result of experts acting exactly like experts act. It’s not a result of incompetence, it’s a result of overconfidence.