Originally Posted by Val
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:

Myth of Hard Work: The myth posits that lots and lots of practice makes a prodigy.

Myth of Not Working: The other extreme is that prodigies are born that way and will always be prodigies because they were born that way.
My mom keeps buying me Malcolm Gladwell books, and after reading the first couple, I developed a strange, instinctive distaste for his work... although I could never really understand why his books irritated me. And then a couple weeks back I came across this little jewel on the intertoobs:
http://www.malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com/

Perhaps it's his over-simplification that I find grating, but at least the gentle(?) mockery at that site makes me giggle.

Regarding Outliers in particular, I like Val's observations... and especially the two "myths" demonstrating extremes. Our DS9 definitely holds the "Myth of Not Working" as gospel truth, trying everything in his power to avoid any meaningful effort in life. He's forever hoping to rely on his highly-capable melon, while I work tirelessly to push him to the other end, almost wishing at times for stark -- if not moderately painful -- object lessons that will teach him the importance of hard work.

I must admit that my inner-Amy-Chua definitely regrets not pushing him harder along the way, especially when I see him give up (or not even undertake) tasks that pose even the slightest degree of difficulty. Even after two grade skips, the greatest regular challenge he encounters is... well... getting to Purple Wizard Level 19 ( or whatever) in his favorite online game.

Our kid's definitely an Outlier, and he has no where near 10,000 hours of anything (other than whining) under his belt. When I look at what he's been able to do so far, I can only imagine the possibilities were he to put even a fraction of those 10K hours toward something productive.

Being offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house. - Fran Lebowitz