Facebook feed showed yet another plug from Harvard Business Review (HBR) on Carol Dweck's concept of a growth mindset as it pertains to Microsoft's adaptation. I quit reading the book when she cited Enron executives as role models for creativity and ingenuity as I always thought the creative branch was over at Arthur Andersen.
Summary of Mindset: Everyone can whine about things, people succeed by believing they can and actually doing it.
Angela "Grit" Duckworth invents new vocabulary to go along with her new revelation that success comes from passion and perseverance in her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Angela has been on
and headline of articles such as this one from Forbes. Suggestions for her next buzzwords coined have been rest of the breakfast menu such as oat(s), egg(s), ham, and bacon.
Summary of Grit: Watch the movie Forrest Gump.
Last but not least, we have Malcolm "10K" Gladwell and his book Outliers. A Princeton study done back in 2014 on the meta-analysis of performance in different domains only found a 12% difference in performance based on practice in this article. Primary counter-argument for the 10,000-hour theory? It has to be deliberate practice and not just any practice that can allow a person to trend towards mastery as cited in the previous article and as well as this one on the National Post.
Summary of Outliers and ancillary books: Practice under a superb coach/teacher/mentor and actually know what the hell you are doing and love it at the same time. Hours are irrelevant.
Major Sales Pitch: You have to have the right growth mindset and grit to endure 10,000-hours of training to become a true Jedi Master. [Mindset->Grit->10K Race]
Let's examine history. We've survived for thousands of years, tiptoed through disease and war, built World Wonders, innovated and engineered ourselves to the current modern life. Did we really haphazardly survive all this time without the above tools or perhaps we've been doing this the entire time under other terms? My people (Chinese) built a Big Wall to keep foreigners (Mongols) out, Egyptians built Pyramids, Europeans survived the Dark Ages and flourished through the Renaissance (thank you Assassin Creed, history class could never compare to the Animus), and now we got the internet and this wonderful place called WSO. In the first two examples of the Chinese and Egyptians came down to one simple concept; work or die. Surprisingly enough, from this is 'new' idea of work, the aforementioned items are two of the Seven World Wonders.
I'm not bullish on re-branded buzzwords. These books are good at explaining basic concepts to first time readers but the idea that we've somehow missed the train for tens of millennia is hard to swallow. It's like the new twig calling the branch and the tree trunk fragile.
Do you believe these ideas are new?
Books referenced can be found on Amazon.com:
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Outliers: The Story of Success
These books have their value, but the information is mostly intuitive and put in practice by successful people who never even read these. While there are people who read these books and still fail at acting on these concepts.
In America, if you are willing to go above and beyond its pretty easy to get recognized for it. Escaping poverty does take some luck, but if you are already in a place where you can be complacently middle class and educated, it is more than doable to keep climbing upwards.
Good observations. The intelligent ones get ahead of the curve and spread long positions in viable opportunities. When certain options yield a significant return, the story is told, repeated, commoditized, and the next wave of adopters will yield a diminished but still substantial return from their previous baseline. When existing ideas no longer work, they are bundled into a CDO, new buzzwords invented on old terms, marketed, and resold onto the new unsuspecting crowd with razor thin margins remaining (Zero to One). Effective techniques are cross platform as it works in Finance as well as the Publishing world. Old is the new sexy.
Bruce Lee says it best when commenting on being [Shapeless and Flexible](
).
"Be like water my friend!" - Bruce Lee
All of above books are retelling of tales of those who took the road less traveled and how that made all the difference. At best, they can give you guidance on identifying the least traveled roads and how to walk that path from those who've been there and back. If that's the case, you do better just reading (auto)biographies of the people you consider your Heroes and emulating their strengths, selecting traits you find undesirable to avoid, and you will be solid!
The Great Wall was less about keeping foreigners out, more about making aggressive land claims into the lands of foreigners. Hadrian's Wall was a similar strategy.
Things that make my eyes glaze over and trigger extreme cynicism - "academics" who heavily reference pop culture to sell their concepts to the masses, Ted Talks, anything on a best seller list.
SSits, great input! This is why some of these readings of old philosophers have to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt. Sun Tzu's work is more about romanticizing the tactics used in his time and careful application to life issues in general than it is about strategies that can endure in the battlefields throughout the sands of time.
The Battle for the "impact factor" of Academics has spilled over to book publications in textbook and self-authored paperbacks. TED Talks and other mediums of publication are used to pump and dump. Legal? Sure, why not... I want to see these academia elite sell grit to starving farmers in Asia and tell them that they can't succeed in life because they don't have enough passion or motivation to achieve their goals. Ms.Duckworth would do fine working in the fields during the Cultural Revolution if she was old enough, right? Leeches on legs 24/7/365 anyone?
I read these publications with caution. You can organically get a lot of this yourself by logical deduction and intuition if you learn to listen to yourself instead. Reading is dangerous because it is a conscious and subconscious process. The textbook syndrome happens because you are taught to comprehend all this and accept things on the first pass as true to regurgitate it for homework or an exam. Think Slow!!!
The real struggle is this: Black Mirror: Season 1 Episode 2 - Fifteen Million Merits Once you get on the stage and get recognition, can you really turn it off and walk out without becoming one of them?
" I quit reading the book when she cited Enron executives as role models for creativity and ingenuity as I always thought the creative branch was over at Arthur Andersen." -Nice
I think it's better to have read these books than not to have.
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