Autobiographical Outlier
I'm finally getting around to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and am enthralled. The way I learn best, though, is hands-on. In this case, my goal is to look at our own relative success (moderate, perhaps, by some standards) to see what I can learn.
As I chronicle what I think might be meaningful points in my life, it's important to recognize that this is autobiographical and I certainly have some bias. My goal is to walk through some of the lessons of Outliers as I read and see how things stack up.Date of birth
I was born in July 1969. As a student that made me one of the youngest, and at a disadvantage with my peers. This was especially true when it came to playing sports. Not that I have ever been physically large: I'm a short, 5' 6" guy. I can run like hell, but never got a chance to put in my 10,000 hours when they mattered. There wasn't time for that. But I sprinted against my dad countless times, and I'm not bad. I could have been better.
More importantly, even as the youngest in my class, being born in 1969 got me into our junior high the first year that we had a computer lab. I learned that if I did my homework at home, instead of study hall, that I could log a ton of hours learning basic on TRS-80s, all the way from Model Is to Model IIIs.
Much like Gladwell's story of Joy, I learned that my roadblock to learning wasn't punchcards, but my own typing speed. I first learned to type on a manual typewriter, on my own time, at home. Somehow we got our hands on a typing manual. I'm not quite sure what my parents thought about that. As a seventh grade boy, I was one of the only in typing class. We were told that the four TRS-80 Model IIIs would be available on rotation. When students started shying away from them, I took a permanent seat at them. The only exception: an assignment where we created art on the typewriter. A dominant business technology, for me, had become a way to produce art, and nothing more.
I was also fortunate in high school: algebra teacher Greg Nerbovig (a classmate of my dad) had created his own Pascal Compiler; Apple Computer had aggressively started promoting to educational institutions, and we had a new computer lab. Unlike my predecessors, I could take a programming course.
We also had a computer club. I was an officer. Not only could I log hours on the computer, but I could gain life experience that colleges would be interested in as an applicant. I was well on my way to logging 10,000 hours.
Was this quite the advantage that a Gates had with his private high school? Hardly. But not bad, either.