It's all relative. Those kids are competing against eachother, not me from podunk Michigan. So it's an arms race. If the kid across the street goes to fancy pre-school, he's going to get advantages you'll miss out on that will put him ahead of the game.
I just read Gladwell's "Outliers" this week and he talks at length about this very thing.
Here's how he puts it. If you're in Canada and you were born just days after the cut-off for age group hockey, then when you're 10, you'll be 6-7 months older than a lot of the other kids on your team. That makes a big difference at that age. So you'll make the traveling team and the younger kids won't. On the traveling team, you get better coaches, better equipment, better opponents. So the gap between you and those other kids gets A LOT wider.
Five years later, you're maybe looking at the NHL while those other kids are sitting in the stands, because you got access to the better coaches, because you were born 6 months before them.
That's why the parents want to get their kids into the fancy pre-schools.
Outliers is an excellent book. Much, much better than "Blink," which I thought was kind of boring.
I might look into buying Outliers. Part of Gladwell's writing style has started to grate on me, but at that recommendation I suppose it's worth checking out?
yes it is worth it. i am reading it right now. I was skeptical at first, as I find books like this pretty shallow (like Freakonomics), but this one is actually good, and backed by real data in many of his points. Especially the hockey players one. The data is right there, the elephant in the room nobody really noticed it.
I have had this saying: You like what are you good at, and you become good at what you like.
When you start an activity/sport or something like chess at an early age, the differences between you and other kids are minor, and if you have even a small 2%-5% edge, you end up winning. And you endup liking it, and work/study/practice harder on that, and you end up really good at it later on, and your performance will be a magnitude better from those kids that were only little bit behind you.
And in sports the day you were born is very important. I guess the school you go (elementary/middle school) is very important too.
I just finished reading it as well. He plays the same abusive games with stats and data that he does in his other books ("science by anecdote", if you will), but it's still a good read.
There's a lot to be said for talent and hard work, but there's even more to be said about circumstance.
Save yourself the time and read the Ericson paper directly. Most of Outliers is based on it with anecdotes to pad it. Many of the newspaper articles about Outliers repeat the anecdotes in detail.
I just read Gladwell's "Outliers" this week and he talks at length about this very thing.
Here's how he puts it. If you're in Canada and you were born just days after the cut-off for age group hockey, then when you're 10, you'll be 6-7 months older than a lot of the other kids on your team. That makes a big difference at that age. So you'll make the traveling team and the younger kids won't. On the traveling team, you get better coaches, better equipment, better opponents. So the gap between you and those other kids gets A LOT wider.
Five years later, you're maybe looking at the NHL while those other kids are sitting in the stands, because you got access to the better coaches, because you were born 6 months before them.
That's why the parents want to get their kids into the fancy pre-schools.
Outliers is an excellent book. Much, much better than "Blink," which I thought was kind of boring.