Lift Up Your Hearts!

It had been a few years since our last visit to a concert of the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra, and I couldn't help thinking throughout that I wish this had been the orchestra of Janet's experience.  Orchestras, as well as people, can develop much in fifteen years!

After very creditable performances by the Overture Strings and Prelude Orchestras, the Philharmonia took the stage.  Back in Janet's day, students looked forward to graduating from the Phil to the top orchestra, the Symphonic, in order to play the "real" version of major orchestral works rather than reduced arrangements; now the Philharmonic plays the full versions, also.  They did a great job with Tchaikovsky's March Slave, Shostakovich's Festive Overture, and—my personal favorite of this concert—Carried Up in the Fields, by John Dupuis.  John is now the conductor of the Phil, but in our day he was one of the FSYO's best flute players, and played with Janet in their wind quintet, Quintessence.  (We knew him when....)

Best of all, though, John is a composer.  I knew that when he was still a teenager, and the FSYO premièred his Atlantis.  Universal Studios acknowledged the same by featuring an excerpt from Atlantis at the grand opening of their Islands of Adventure theme park.  Here's a link so that you can hear Atlantis for yourself.  The oboe solo always makes me tear up; you can guess who played it at the première.  If you like that, check out more of John's works on his site.

Shostakovich was featured heavily on this program.  After intermission, the Symphonic Orchestra took the stage, beginning with Concerto Competition winner Giancarlo Licitra, playing the first movement of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto No. 1.  Their final piece was the fourth movement of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5.  In between they played another new work, LocoMotion by Stella Sung.  I 've almost always liked Dr. Sung's music, and this was no exception.

Both the Philharmonic and Symphonic orchestras played excellently, and Giancarlo Licitra superbly.

But back to John Dupuis.  After conducting, Carried Up in the Fields, John commented that even when he tries not to write movie music, it comes out sounding like movie music.  I don't know how true that really is, but I say,

Go for it, John!  Movie music is your destiny. 

Back in 1999, after hearing Atlantis for the first time, I wrote in my journal, "Move over, John Williams and James Horner.  (I don’t say Patrick Doyle yet, though!)"

Feel free to make me change my mind about Patrick Doyle.

I dislike shopping.  (Those who know me, also know how understated that is, but "loathe" seems too strong a word to use about something so trivial.)  On top of that, I have an aversion to adding "stuff" to our home.  Until proven otherwise, if it takes up space, it's as welcome as an undocumented worker in Arizona.

It only took me a couple of years of waffling before opening the door to this immigrant, but it immediately proved itself a trustworthy and productive citizen:  a Cuisenart hand blender.

Why buy a hand blender when you have a perfectly good regular blender already?  That nagging question also postoned this purchase, but the answer soon became obvious:  despite the similarity of their names, the two appliances serve different purposes, and the hand blender is far superior for making sauces, soups, and—our favorite—smoothies.

The blender itself takes up little space.  (The accessories take up a bit more, and I actually haven't used them yet.)  No more laborious transfer of hot sauce bit by bit from the pan to the blender:  in a few seconds the hand blender delivers a smooth sauce right in the cooking pot.  Throw some frozen berries, yoghurt, milk, orange juice concentrate, and almond flavoring (for example) into a quart measuring cup, whirl it around with the blender, and—voilá!—an easy, healthy smoothie.  Best of all, the hand blender is an absolute snap to clean.

Okay, so I'm lazy.  Is it that much trouble to use the regular blender for these things?  Maybe it shouldn't be, but with the hand blender I actually do them.  These days, I'm very much into arranging my life for success.  Glenn Doman's philosophy, "We arrange for the child to win," works for adults, too.  Our new hand blender has turned out to be an effective addition to that toolbox.

At last, an explanation of what Janet did in Basel before Joseph was born:

Early Music (H/T Andy B.),

and Barefoot Running (H/T Patti W.).  (Preview without grandkid viewers.)

I Am David (2003, PG)

Six years ago, my sister-in-law informed me that one of my favorite books, Anne Holm’s North to Freedom, had been made into a movie called I Am David.  Let this serve as an encouragement (?) to those who think I’ll never follow through on their recommendations:  Last week, we finally saw the movie.

Let me get the standard litany out of the way:  The movie isn’t nearly as good as the book.  It takes the plot, the setting, and the characters, but loses most of what makes the book sublime.  To be fair, translating David’s thoughts and transformations to film is probably impossible.  This may explain why I rarely find watching a movie to be an exalting experience.

That said, I Am David is very much a worthwhile movie to see.  It is the story of 12-year-old David’s escape from the only life he can remember:   the Communist prison camp in which he was raised, primarily by a man named Johannes.

(Johannes, incidentally, is from the Alsace region of France, and in consequence David’s journey takes him through Basel, a fact that escaped me on previous readings of the book, since at the time Basel had no particular significance for me.  That part is missing from the movie, however, so don’t be looking for shots of the Münster.  In fact, all of the movie—with scenes in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and Denmark—was filmed in Bulgaria.)

Ben Tibber, who plays David, does a better job than many adult actors I’ve seen; his face got him the job, and he makes great use of it for wordless expression.  Jim Caviezel plays Johannes so movingly that I wasn’t in the least surprised to learn that he also played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ.

The PG rating is because of some violent prison camp scenes, but the movie does a great job of suggesting the horror without being unnecessarily graphic.  My primary complaint, other than the loss of the most important parts of the book, is that several of the movie’s characters are less pleasant than in the book—the Italian sailor demanding a bribe, rather than simply helping David, for example.

Naturally, I strongly suggest reading North to Freedom rather than watching the movie, but if you’re not going to read the book, I Am David would be a great addition to your video experience.

Daniel May: The Tall and the Small
Sibelius: Symphony No. 1
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto

Christopher Wilkins, conductor
Joshua Bell, violin

The first work on the program was a tribute to Jonathan May, onetime director of the Florida Symphony Youth Orchestra, who died unexpectedly last year.  The Tall and the Small was composed by May's brother, and his wife, Maureen, played the solo cello parts.  I was impressed that she was able to perform this without breaking down.  The most exciting aspect of the piece, however, was that it was composed for double string orchestra, the "Tall" orchestra being the OPO, and the "Small" orchestra made up of student musicians.  I'm sure that performing with the OPO was quite a thrill for them—not to mention sharing the program with Joshua Bell.  At the risk of making some of my readers feel old, I'll mention that they had auditioned for the job via YouTube!

I like Sibelius, so perhaps if I were more familiar with his first symphony I would have enjoyed it more.  As it was, I confess I found both pre-intermission works rather soporific.  Looking around, it was apparent I was not the only one.

But only a terminal narcoleptic could have slept during the second half.

I've spoken before of my concern about the superstar phenomenon that destroys the "middle class" in music, sports, and many other fields.  Yet there is no doubt that Bell's superstardom is deserved.  As is that of the Stradivarius he plays.  Never have I heard so many textures come from a single instrument.  And what high notes!  What harmonics!  Years ago, when I asked one of Janet's violin teachers how he knew where to place his finger when leaping to the far reaches of the fingerboard, he replied, "You stab and hope."  Bell stabs and knows.  What's more, despite his appearing to have put in his 10,000 hours on this concerto alone, the performance conveyed an almost playful delight.

As an encore, he began with what sounded like a reprise of the magical cadenza from the first movement, but which quickly turned into a fiery cadenza for Yankee Doodle.

The full-house audience was appreciative and enthusiastic, with many unable to restrain themselves from a premature standing ovation after the first movement of the Tchaikovsky.  I confess:  I applauded, too.  You just had to; it was that transcendent.  Joshua Bell made the news four years ago for being decidedly under appreciated when he played the part of a street musician in a Washington, D.C. Metro station.  As unobservant as I can be when focussed on the goal at hand, I like to think I could not have passed such music by without standing, transfixed and open-mouthed.  Then again, I've always had a soft spot for street musicians.

Whatever it cost the OPO to bring Bell to Orlando, I'm glad they did.  His performance of the Tchaikovsky was like a meal at the Cheval Blanc in Basel.

How can you take a book without one single battle scene and turn it into an action movie?

"How" is actually quite well answered by the makers of the most recent attempt to bring Narnia to Hollywood, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  But what I really meant by the question was, "Why would you want to do so, and where do you get the audacity?  If you want to tell a different story, why take someone else's character names and setting?"

But I've sung this same song a lot recently, most notably for The Lord of the Rings and the first two Narnia films, and it's getting wearisome.  If I'm tired of movies that rip the heart and beauty out of a book and try to pass their new creation off as the real thing, then others are surely tired of me whining about it.  Perhaps the action film, bratty teen, and self-esteem genres are the "heart language" of today, and the filmmakers should be commended for speaking to people in a language they can hear.  Maybe the door will open a crack for what I see as the true beauty and wonder of the books.

What I liked:

• Technically, the film is well done; I especially admire the way Reepicheep is animated. 
• Eustace, hardly one's favorite character in the book, is well played; the actor does a great job.
• The ending is reasonably depicted, despite passing over the wonders of the Last Sea, and eliminating the scene with the Lamb.

What I didn't like:

• The pervasive, dark creepiness.  For a story filled with sunshine and light, light so real that by the end of the book it is "drinkable," this is more than strange.  The center of the movie is not the bright goodness of the sun and the journey to Aslan's country, but a quest to conquer the evil of the Dark Island.  (In the book, Dark Island is but a short episode, and it's not conquered, but fled from, after Lord Rhoop is rescued.)
• As in the other movies, the children have lost their admirable innocence in favor of an egotistical self-centeredness.
• The re-taking of the Lone Islands, accomplished in the book by chivalry, loyalty, and intelligent action, without a drop of blood shed, is turned into a battle.  What's more, the point is completely missed that the evil of slavery is made possible by a collusion of profiteering and bureaucracy.
• As in Prince Caspian, Aslan comes across as a rather tame lion who drifts in and out of the story without affecting it much, rather than the point on which many of the episodes turn.
• The mysterious story in the magician's book, "about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill" is missing altogether, as is the point that Dark Island is "the land where dreams come true."  Also Ramandu, the retired star, being made younger by the fire-berries from the sun, and Caspian's battle with himself at the end of the world, along with many other stories that could easily have been fit in if so many battle scenes had not been added.
• The lesson Lucy learns from her struggles with the magician’s book has been changed from the perils of eavesdropping to the importance of self-esteem.
• The "un-dragoning" of Eustace occurs out of sequence, and is given short shrift.
• The significance of the Stone Knife at the table on Ramandu's Island is passed over completely, the enchantment of the lords being reduced to a punishment for fighting in a place where violence is not permitted.

The more I think of it, the odder the fighting in Dawn Treader appears.  Unlike Prince Caspian, in which battles are essential to much of the story—though even so I think the movie overdoes the point—Dawn Treader, the book, includes example after example of battles averted.  To name a few:

• Caspian is able to make the voyage because all Narnia is at peace.
• When approached by the slavers, Caspian insists on not being identified as the king, and resists Reepicheep’s suggestion of battle as being unwise in their disadvantageous position.
• The Lone Islands, as mentioned above, are retaken, and the slaves freed, with a show of (assumed) force and a strong will, but without a fight.
• Eustace, in dragon form, was indeed very useful to the others, but not as a fighter.  He explored the island, took his friends on rides, brought them a tree to replace the broken mast, and re-provisioned the ship by hunting wild goats and pigs.  “He was a very humane killer too, for he could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail….”
• The sea serpent is not conquered by battle, but by cleverness.  “Others would have joined [in fighting] if at that moment Reepicheep had not called out, “Don’t fight!  Push!”
• The appearance of Aslan breaks the spell of Deathwater Island just as Caspian lays his hand on his sword to fight with Edmund.
• There is no battle with the Dufflepuds, although the Chief does once send his spear flying into a tree.  Reepicheep explains, “If we had any assurance of saving [Lucy] by battle, our duty would be very plain.  It appears to me that we have none.  And the service they ask of her is in no way contrary to her Majesty’s honour, but a noble and heroical act.”
• As mentioned earlier, after rescuing the Lord Rhoop, Caspian orders the ship to flee Dark Island with all speed, much to Reepicheep’s disappointment.
• The quarrel of the three lords at Ramandu’s Island is prevented from escalating to violence when one of them grabs the Knife of Stone, “a thing not right for him to touch,” sending them into the enchanted sleep.
• Reepicheep is distracted from answering the Sea King’s challenge to combat by his discovery that the water they are sailing in is no longer salty.
• As Reepicheep, the mighty warrior, heads off to Aslan’s country, he flings away his sword, saying, “I shall need it no more.”  (The inclusion of this scene is part of what makes the ending of the movie better than I had by that point come to expect.)

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie tells an interesting story, better than most these days, and if I did not know the book, I might have liked it.  I hope it is (has been?) successful enough to encourage the production of the rest of the Narnia series, even though I know I will continue to be disappointed.  I can’t recommend it to those who have higher hopes that their children will discover the glories of what C. S. Lewis wrote.  And yet …  I also can’t help thinking … hoping … that maybe the movies are a good thing for those whose alternative will not be the books, but something darker, more violent, and with less heroic goodness than these films have to offer.

We slept well until 4:30 a.m.  That sounds early, but it’s not unusual for us to start the day ony an hour later.  Not bad at all, considering Hawaiian clocks—in the summertime—are six hours skewed from Florida’s.

(My current approach to combatting jet lag is to sleep as much as possible on the plane, but not to make an effort to sleep.  Once upon a time I acted as if I could get a full night’s sleep on an overnight flight:  brushing my teeth, wearing eye covers, and settling down as much as is possible in a coach-class set, with a pillow and a blanket.  After several flights with marginal success at best, I decided to ignore my watch altogether.  After boarding, I settle down to enjoy myself, usually with a book or my World of Puzzles magazine.  I’m at the stage of life where it’s easy to doze—actually, I’ve been at that stage for at least 40 years—so when I feel sleepy, I set the book down and allow myself to snooze.  I rarely even bother to take off my glasses; I just lean back and sleep.  When I wake, I pick up where I left off and begin the cycle again.  I find this much more satisfactory, because I’m no longer annoyed by announcements, food  carts, or neighbors who must get out of their seats.  If they wake me up, they’ve only disturbed a short nap, not my “night’s rest.”  I no longer worry that I’m “supposed” to be sleeping.   I enjoy the flight more, and adjustment to the new time schedule comes more easily.)

We would have liked to make a faster start to the day, but had a morning appointment with our “personal concierge,” who would help us plan our week, including the mandatory timeshare presentation.  She was actually very helpful, with useful suggestions for places to stop on our around-the-island tour.  She was also able to reschedule our presentation, which had originally been placed in the middle of the day, a most annoying and wasteful time.

The first meeting accomplished, we headed out of the Hilton property to the shopping/restaurant area at the entrance to the resort.  (The resort is more than the Hilton sites, although they constitute a large part of it.)  There we made a breakfast of “Japanese Tempura Style Fish and Chips” (and shrimp).  Delicious!

Unless you consider fish & chips for breakfast a bit odd, there was nothing about its onset to indicate how incredible this day would be.

Other people may not have this problem, but I quail at the thought of spending more than $1000 on an activity that lasts only two hours.  Even grocery shopping isn’t that expensive.  The two of us can fly to Pittsburgh and back for half that.  Or one of us to Switzerland (though not back).  However….

If you’re going to go all the way to Hawaii, I recommend in the strongest terms that you invest in a Blue Hawaiian helicopter tour.  We decided to go all out, choosing the two-hour tour and the fancy Eco-Star helicopter, and are so glad we did.  What an amazing experience!

On the practical side, it was a fantastic introduction to the island, giving us a much better idea of what we wanted to do with the rest of our days there.  (I know, I know.  We should have had all that figured out ahead of time.  But we didn’t, and I don’t know how we could have done better than what transpired, no matter how much we had planned.  Hmm....  We might have saved a bit on the Volcano hotel; more on that later.  But that’s about it.)  We learned a lot about which treks were worth taking, and which were a lot of effort for a view much less interesting than the one we had from the air.

The view.  The views!  It would have been rewarding enough merely flying all over the island.  On the first leg of the trip we flew across to Hilo:  from the desert,

over ranch land,

to rain forest.

But that’s not what you’re waiting to see.

We flew right over the top of Kilauea!

At the arrow, the red-hot lava is pouring forth, turning grey as it cools but still flowing.  This is not the spectacular effect our grandkids were hoping to see, preferably with Grandma and Dad-o standing perilously close, but this is God’s creation, not Walt Disney’s, and not to be activated on demand.  We were lucky to see lava flow at all, as until recently it had been flowing through underground lava tubes rather than into the caldera.  And it was truly amazing to see Creation ongoing.

After the volcano tour, we stopped briefly in Hilo for refueling, and then it was on to the waterfalls!  The Waipi‘o Valley is best seen by helicopter, unless you have a four-wheel drive vehicle and a death wish.

Hawaii’s falls are not broad, but very tall and beautiful.

An expensive ride?  Yes.  Worth the cost?  Absolutely.

Did I mention that flying in a helicopter feels like flying?  Or what I imagine flying would be like, were I actually able to do so.

After a lunch/dinner of pulled pork—which is big in Hawaii as well as South Carolina—we went back to the room, intending to put on our swim suits and check out the resort’s saltwater lagoon and freshwater pools.  But I made the mistake of lying down, “just for a few minutes,” and quickly lost consciousness.  Porter spent the time reading our guidebooks, occasionally making a half-hearted, and thoroughly unsuccessful, attempt at awakening me.  Our early arising, bright sunshine—which always makes me sleepy—and exciting adventures had wiped me out … until 4:30 a.m. of the new day.

I'm still working on Hawaii, Day 2, so today you get to see the souvenir we brought home—for the worms.

It's billed as a compostable cup, and was of excellent quailty for drinking.  According the the manufacturer,

Please note that composting is required for biodegradation. These cups will biodegrade within 180 days in a commercial composting facility but can take up to a year or more to biodegrade in a home composting system.

We will see what the worms make of it.  I suspect it will take quite a while for them to have an impact on the cup:  they prefer their food in small pieces, preferably soft.  They will eat the mushier parts first, leaving harder pieces until bugs and microbes have degraded them somewhat—see the piece of corn cob to the right of the cup.

If a good neighbor is one who watches out for your home while you are gone, and a great neighbor takes care of your mail and pets (even if there are 10,000 of them), what can you say about a neighbor who will take you to the airport at 4:30 in the morning?  That was the first leg of our trip to Hawaii.  (Technically, “Hawai‘i,” with the left single quote, but I’m going with the simplified spelling.)

Hawaii?  What were we doing there?  That’s what I asked myself.

Ever since my class in elementary school debated the relative merits of our new states, Alaska and Hawaii, I’d preferred the former.  What a pernicious influence our early experiences can have!  My mind later realized that outside of the debate context, this is not a choice—one can, and should, like both—but my prejudices from that forced decision remained.

Thus I was not as excited as some might be when Porter announced that he had made a commitment to go to Hawaii.  I wasn’t upset; I knew he wanted to get there sometime, and I find vacations a lot more fun if someone else makes the arrangements.  Not upset, but surprised, because we usually debate such plans for months before acting.

As it turned out, he had debated for months, until he was worn down by a Hilton Vacation Club salesman at the hotel where he had stayed while working in New York City.  So our great deal came at the cost of a 2 ½-hour timeshare presentation.  (It was well worth the price, but more on that in a later post.)  The deal included three days at the Hilton Waikoloa Village resort on the Big Island, a rental car, a luau, and a $200 voucher to use sometime in the next six months at another Hilton property of our choice.  We added a fair amount of our own money to extend the stay to six days, but used frequent flier points for our plane tickets, so I guess Porter earned this dream trip in several ways!

We travelled relatively light—it’s easier when you don’t have friends and family on the other end—but still ended up with one checked bag and  three small carry-ons.  It didn’t seem as if we were bringing that much, but snorkelling equipment, a video camera, extra shoes, and clothes for both hot and cold weather do take up space.  Not to mention a computer, though we only brought one this time.

The flight from Orlando to Atlanta was fine, although we were disappointed to learn that apparently flying on points disqualifies you for upgrades, which we had been looking forward to thanks to Porter’s super-elite status.  Ah, well.  First class doesn’t get to the runway any sooner than coach.  Later, actually!

It was in Atlanta that things appeared to go wrong.  I missed the part where we had signed up for the Delta Fitness Plan, but the inevitable gate change didn’t surprise me.  We began to suspect more than a simple gate change when boarding time came and went.  Then we were told there was an equipment problem, but Maintenance was working on it.  And working on it.  “You don’t want to fly all the way to Los Angeles with non-functional bathrooms, do you?”  Given that we had a connection to make, I would have been willing to take my chances, but Delta wasn’t.

Finally, we decided to investigate other options, as the odds of making our Kona flight were diminishing rapidly.  As it happened, we were right at the entrance to the Delta Customer Service area when the cancellation of our Atlanta – L.A. flight was announced; thus we found ourselves at the head of what soon became a very. long. line.

Platinum status may not have gained us a first class upgrade, but it did shove us to the front of the next line, inside Customer Service itself.  There, the kind and very efficient agent booked us on a flight directly from Atlanta to Honolulu, and a puddle jumper thence to Kona.  Level II of the fitness program:  this gate change required racing to the most distant wing of the airport.  We made it—but if we had not been where we were when the cancellation was made, or if we had had to wait in the non-status line, we would have had plenty of time to use the generous $16 worth of food vouchers we had been given.

The new arrangements turned out to be much nicer than the originals.  We skipped L.A., added an additional island to our tour (albeit for less than an hour), and landed in Kona not much later than originally scheduled.  The hardest part was believing we were still in America after having flown so far.  Door-to-door travel time was about 19 hours; after all that, shouldn’t we have been in Switzerland?

The Kona airport is tiny.  About a dozen gates, and none of those enclosed jetways:  You walk down the stairs from the plane, and through the weather.  Fortunately, Kona is on the dry side of the island.

First impression:  Hawaii is bilingual.  Much as Florida’s signs are in English and Spanish, the signs at the airport, rental car agency, and resort are in English and Japanese.  Seventy years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invasion of Hawaii is going strong—in the form of tourists, dropping yen instead of bombs.  It was great to hear Japanese once again, and brush up on important skills, like recognizing the Japanese characters for “exit.”  (As it turns out, we saw more Hawaiian than Japanese once we left the resort area.  More on the Hawaiian language later.)

After check-in, we took an evening walk around the huge resort, and ate what turned out to be our one-and-only resort restaurant meal.  I had a moderately outrageously priced teriyaki chicken sandwich that was quite good, and Porter had a $25 “lobster burger” that was not.

The view from our window

The night was breezy and not too hot, the sunset-and-ocean view was soothing, and dolphins were playing in the nearby lagoon.  We were in Hawaii!

We were in Hawaii:  jet-lagged, and with a busy day scheduled for tomorrow.  Grateful for the day’s many blessings, we collapsed into bed.

Waikoloa sunset

Here's a quick story for you while I work on the Hawaii posts.  First the bad news.  The report is from Australia, but the practice is legal in America, though they are supposed to tell us about it in the fine print.

Yes, it's Frankenfood—but you can't deny it has a coolness factor, too.

As far as I can tell, there are two major problems:

1. Contamination.  Those of us who like our beef to be mooing know that a rare hamburger is much riskier than a rare steak.  With the steak, even brief cooking kills surface bacteria, but with the hamburger the "surface" has been mixed all through the patty.  Thanks to meat glue, your piece of meat may look like a steak yet have all the contamination risks of a burger.
2. Dishonesty.  It's like the carton of juice that proudly proclaims, "Unsweetened," but in the fine print admits it contains sucralose.  I wouldn't make using transglutaminase illegal, but I would require a clear, open acknowlegement that the food is not natural.

Don't ban the foods; be honest and let the consumer decide.

This is the best thing to do with a soda bottle since Diet Coke and Mentos.  The insructions are clear, and the cost of materials low.  I know some grandchildren who would love it.  (H/T Conversion Diary.)

Outliers:  The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2008)

Malcolm Gladwell’s books always turn my mind upside down.  He may not always be right, but he’s always exciting.

What makes a superstar?  What differentiates Bill Gates from the average computer geek, the Beatles from a garage band, the top athletes from the wannabes?  Talent, certainly, and hard work—but Outliers reveals that the most critical factors are often surprising, even random.

The 10,000 hour rule  Talent, we generally believe, is something we are born with.  Intelligence, musical ability, athletic skill:  you either have it, or you don’t.  There is more excuse than truth there, however.  There is a threshold of talent required in any field, but beyond that, experience is the all-important key.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good.  It’s the thing that makes you good.

Study after study has shown that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class expertise in any field.  That’s 2,000 hours per year—the equivalent of a full-time job—for five years.  The opportunity to get those 10,000 hours, at the right place and time, makes superstars.  For Bill Gates it was a series of unusual circumstances, beginning in middle school, that gave him access to computers that even most college students did not have.  Before he dropped out of Harvard to make history, Gates had been programming for well over 10,000 hours.

Thanks to a chance encounter—and some illicit incentive—the Beatles found themselves in a set of gigs that required an extraordinarily long performance commitment:  up to eight hours per night, seven days a week.  It was the making of the group.  By the time they came to America in 1964, they had some 1200 live performances under their guitar straps.

Or, as Shinichi Suzuki said, “Skill equals knowledge plus 10,000 times.”  Another gem from the Suzuki world (though I’ve seen it attributed in several ways, most commonly to Vince Lombardi):  Practice doesn’t make perfect.  Only perfect practice makes perfect.  Clearly one must put more into those 10,000 hours than just time.

Inequities  When it comes to sports, astrology would appear to rule:  the month of your birth will make or break you.  Because children’s sports leagues are sorted by age, and because a year’s growth makes a tremendous difference in a child’s physical strength and coordination, the oldest members of a team have a considerable advantage over the youngest.  They appear more talented, and are moved to the better leagues, where they get better coaching, and, significantly, more playing time.  The effect is cumulative, with the “rich” getting richer at each step.

In school, another institution segregated by age, the same effect is devastating to those who start kindergarten less mature than their classmates.  The achievement gap that appears then rarely closes.

At four-year colleges in the United States…students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent.

Such systems are tremendously wasteful of talent.  Potential hockey stars—and Nobel Prize winners—are being squandered merely because they were born at the end of the year.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

— Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

How much genius is necessary?  Christopher Langan is arguably one of the world’s most intelligent people, a genius from infancy—talking at six months, teaching himself to read at three—and he was not only intellectually gifted, but artistically and musically as well.  Yet his dysfunctional family left him without the life skills necessary to succeed in college and become the superstar he might have been.

I include this quote from Langan for Porter, who dreamt solutions to programming problems, and for Janet, whose hand would write the answers to math problems without apparent help from her brain.

I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind, all I have to do is concentrate on the question when I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning. … Other times I just feel the answer, and I start typing and the answer emerges onto the page.

Above-average intelligence is a good predictor of academic success, but beyond a certain level, other factors become more important for success.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold.

…

In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University.  Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam.  More than 3,300 were ranked first in the high school class.  How many did Harvard accept?  About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants.  Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn’t, when both have identical—and perfect—academic records?  Of course not.  Harvard is being dishonest.  Schwartz is right.  They should just have a lottery.

What about art?  Surely some people are born with musical or artistic talent, and the rest of us left out.  Well, no.  It’s like intelligence.  Yes, there is a range of abilities, but apparently many more of us could be really good if we were willing to put in the time.

Studies done in the 1990’s of violinists at an elite music school, and of amateur and professional pianists revealed the one critical factor in success was simply how much practice time the musicians put in.

[The researchers] couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did.  Nor could they find any “grinds,” people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works.  That’s it.  And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder.

This is incredibly good news:  We can all be much greater than we think.  But it comes with important questions (mine, not Gladwell’s):  Are we willing to do the work necessary to achieve greatness?  What must be sacrificed to reach that level?  Is it impossible for a Christian, or a parent, or anyone else with broad responsibilities, to be this good at anything without “gaining the whole world and losing his soul”?  Must the needed time be stolen from more important activities, or can it be reclaimed from wastage?  The average American watches 34 hours of television per week.  If we give up television for six years, could we all become excellent in some area?  Is there a level below the top at which we can all be much better at many things than we are now?  At what level is “good enough” better than perfect for most of us?

The language advantage, part 1  Why were so many Korean Airlines plane crashing?  Intensive analysis revealed no mechanical problems, and no lack of skill on the part of the pilots.  The source of the disasters was something called a Power-Distance Index.  Safe flying requires the cockpit crew to feel free to inform and correct the captain, and the input necessary to keep unusual situations from becoming critical was not coming forcefully enough to the Korean pilots from crews that had bowed to them before the flight.  They key to the airline’s remarkable turnaround?  Insisting that English be the language of the cockpit.

Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy.  They needed an opportunity to step outside those cultural roles when they sat in the cockpit, and language was the key to that transformation.  In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients [of formality in the Korean language]:  formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.  Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy.

The language advantage, part 2

[T]here is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.  In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

…

The number system in English is highly irregular.  Not so in China, Japan, and Korea.  They have a logical counting system.  Eleven is ten-one.  Twelve is ten-two.  Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children.  Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty.  American children at that age can count only to fifteen, and most don’t reach forty until they’re five.  By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily.  Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22).  Only then can she do the math….Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equations is right there, embedded in the sentence.  No number translation is necessary:  It’s five-tens-nine.

Meaningful work  What advantage did the late-18^th century New York garment industry confer on the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and how is that related to rice farming in Asia?  Independence, meaningful work, and the conviction that success is a direct result of effort.  (Read the book to find out why.)

[A]utonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward…are, most people agree, the three qualities work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Every four years, an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world.

…  [The students] also have to fill out a questionnaire.  It asks them all kinds of things, such as what their parents’ level of education is, and what their views about math are, and what their friends are like.  It’s not a trivial exercise.  It’s about 120 questions long.  In fact, it’s so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

… As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. … [C]ountries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

The rankings aren’t just similar:  They are identical.

[W]e could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish [in a hypothetical Math Olympics] without asking a single math question.

I can’t agree with Gladwell on everything—for one thing, he has far too much admiration for the institution of school.  But Outliers is well-written, easy to read, and challenging.

It is not the brightest who succeed. … Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf.  It is, rather, a gift.  Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

… To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success … with a society that provides opportunities for all.

Those who would create their utopias at the level of society more often create dystopias, it would seem.  But at local, particular levels—school, community, soccer league, and most especially, family—it might be accomplished.