Have you ever been frustrated because you were not born with enough talent to compete at the highest level?

Just imagine if you were born with the innate basketball talent of Michael Jordan or the swimming ability of Michael Phelps? Wouldn’t your life be sweet?

Sounds great, but here’s the catch. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school team, and for all of Michael Phelps talent, he recently admitted in a Colbert Report interview that before the Olympics he swam 365 days of the year.

That’s right. He swam every day (including holidays and weekends) for about 4-5 hrs. Wouldn’t you think that if someone had such natural talent then they wouldn’t need to work THAT hard?

You can see this pattern repeated over and over by people who achieve greatness. And this doesn’t just apply to sports. For example, Stephen King in his On Writing memoirs describes how he writes every day (even on holidays).

What about music? Surely there are some musical geniuses that are just born with raw talent?

In Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he discusses the following study of classical pianists by K. Anders Ericsson at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music.

They divided the Academy into three groups: average, good and elite. And then they were asked how often they practiced since starting to play piano.

Everyone started young and originally practiced the same amount of time. But as they aged, those in the elite groups practiced more and more while those in the average group maintained the same amount of practice.

The hours of practice were amazingly consistent with the group that each musician fell into. Average students never practiced regularly for more than three hours a week while the elites practiced regularly for thirty hours a week!

Gladwell describes it this way:

The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues 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.

If fact, he goes on to claim that to be an expert at something has little to do with talent and much more to do with putting in the practice. He even quantifies it and says that to really reach expert level requires 10,000 hours of practice.

Not sure that I would place a number on it, but he’s on the right track. It’s not that talent doesn’t matter at all. It just doesn’t matter as much as people might think.

It helps to a degree. To play basketball, for example, you need to be at least six feet tall, but the tallest players are not the best by default. The deciding factor is how hard and consistently you’re willing to work at it.

And at the end of the day, there’s something liberating about that. For the most part, you are not limited by your genes or how you were born.

You CAN achieve greatness in your specialty as long as your willing to put the hours in.

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
-Chinese Proverb

If you want to ensure that your kids succeeded in life, do you know what you should spend your time focusing on?

Would you try to make them as smart as possible by increasing their amount of study? That would be good start, but intelligence is mostly hereditary and it only helps to a certain point.

As cited in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, there was a famous “genius study” where a researcher studied the lives of a highly select group of kids with off the chart IQs. Ironically, after following the kids from middle-school into adulthood, the geniuses were no more successful than other college graduates.

Some of them were highly successful, but so were the same percentage of other students. So they dug deeper to determine what was different about the ones that were so successful.

What they found was that high intelligence only matters to certain level. After that, other skills become more important.

Once you are smart enough, then you need something that only your parents can teach you, namely, how to relate with others. The kids that could readily sell themselves and their ideas to others were more successful in life.

Think about it. If you are genius with a great idea, no one would know of your genius until you get your idea published or implemented. And most great ides don’t publish or implement an idea by themselves.

You need to convince a commercial publisher that your idea has merit and it will sell. Or you need to convince an academic panel that your idea has merit and adds to the current knowledge base to get it published in a journal.

If you start a business around your great idea, you have to convince others to join your company and buy your product. In other words, no matter how you look at it, you need to be able to sell your idea to others.

So what should parents do to cultivate successful kids besides providing intelligent genes?:

1. Communication: Parents who taught their children to confidently communicate their ideas and win people over with their words had more successful kids.
2. Focus on an Interest: Parents who cultivated and encouraged their children’s interests had more successful kids. To be successful in life usually involves specialization and lots of practice.
3. Persistence: Parents who taught their children to diligently ask authority figures for answers and help (without offending) were more successful.

Of course there is no silver bullet to any of this, and luck plays a part. Nothing in life is guaranteed, but if you are looking to make you kids as successful as possible (isn’t every parent?) then this is a place to start.

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

~Christopher Morley

One of the most important decisions you can make is who you spend your time with. You choose your friends, your significant other and who you spend your time with. Those choices can largely affect how healthy you’ll be. Don’t believe that community can affect your health?

Check out this fascinating story cited in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he described the town of Roseto, PA and its inhabitants:

For men over sixty-five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole.

…There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn’t have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That’s it.

After eliminating diet, exercise and genetics, Wolf (the researcher) began to realize the secret of Roseto was the town itself:

As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people.

Recently, we’ve had to consider what is best for an older family member and my mantra has always been that, in general and especially as people age, they are best kept somewhere that they have a community and a purpose.

The only people who have gotten better (and not worse) in retirement homes are those who did not have a community and found one in the retirement home. That happens occasionally, but is the exception to the rule. More often than not people in retirement homes lose their community and their purpose. Their health is soon lost as well.

It is better therefore that two should be together, than one: for they have the advantage of their society.
-Ecclesiastes 4:9

This is the question that my family and I had been trying to answer for a while. Would adding a dog to our family make it better? Or would it make things worse by adding more stress and responsibility to an already busy family?

We’d heard many stories of busy families who had gotten dogs and then regretted it three months later. Sometimes it was because the dogs kept them up at night. Other times it had to do with stained carpet. For some, the newness just wore off and now they were stuck with the responsibility for 10+ years.

I also saw many examples of people who were going through a hard time and thought that getting a dog would fix their problems. But often times, it just made them worse. If you don’t have any time or energy, and you are afraid of a commitment, a dog will not help that. It will make it worse.

But, if you have extra time and energy that you are looking to channel into the next big thing in your life then a dog could be perfect for you. If you are willing to spend time and energy to build a relationship with the dog, you will get unconditional love in return — something that is hard to find many other places in this world.

Oftentimes dogs take the place of children because a childless couple has the time, energy and resources to commit to something. If they don’t have kids, a dog can be a great outlet for that.

I’ll always remember how a guy I used to work with would have stories about his young dogs that exactly matched stories about my young children.

My kids would keep me up at night; so would his dogs. My kids would act up when I wasn’t around; so would his dogs. I would struggle with the right way to discipline the kids; he would struggle with the right way to discipline his dogs (luckily, I never had to resort to the shock collar).

In our current situation, we felt that we were most likely done having kids (knock on wood). And with our youngest turning three and becoming more autonomous, we were looking for the “next thing” to put our energy into.

We had been reluctant for years because of all the horror stories we’d heard, and were just protective about our time. But, at this point in our lives, it felt like the time was finally right.

We spent a lot of time researching breeds and visiting shelters. After playing with a variety of dogs, we found the perfect one from a local animal shelter.

Her name is Dolly and she’s a lab/whippet mix. At one year old, she is already housebroken and loves the kids. She is playful yet still knows when to relax on the couch with us, and she’s already shaping up to be an awesome running partner for Molly and I. We’re not sure how we ever got along without her.

It’s probably still too early to declare total victory, but at this point we are very happy with our decision. The dog has made our life busier as there’s a lot to learn and do, but in so many ways she has made our life better.

We were ready for the commitment, and the time was right.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults.  Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
~George Eliot