Originally Posted by kickball
So I'm curious what this forum thinks about gifted in light of books like Outliers (10,000 hours of practice makes prodigy), Tiger Motherhood (which in a sense desires to validate Outliers), vs the general concept of nature - born this way.

I think that US society suffers from extremes of ideology that, in this case, give birth to what I call the Myth of Hard Work. The myth posits that lots and lots of practice makes a prodigy. The idea that people have put a number (10K) on how many hours you need makes it more extreme to me.

The other extreme is that prodigies are born that way and will always be prodigies because they were born that way. You could call this the Myth of Not Working.

Most people know that the second myth is a myth, but our society labors very hard at pushing the first one as Truth. I believe that this idea actually drives false egalitarianism in schools: everyone just needs a chance, and you can't skip a grade because it would be saying you were "better." Sorry, but differences in abilities are real. Not everyone can get at least a B in geometry, just like not everyone can run 100M in under 13 seconds.

The truth is somewhere in between: in order to really excel, you need to put in a lot of hard work. BUT lots of practice won't guarantee that you'll go to the nationals. Even if you do, it also doesn't guarantee that someone who was born with, say, an incredible set of ice skating genes won't beat you in spite of having practiced less. Or that some outsider who has a genetic talent for theoretical physics won't figure out the answer ahead of all the great minds at the universities.

Just my rambling thoughts.

Val