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It's not that he ended up badly - he's got a nice house and a wife iirc - but his life, especially his academic and professional career, is a series of missed chances and denied opportunities. For someone with his potential, he's effectively been spit out by the 'establishment' and he works on his own theory of everything now. Point is: the problem never was that he wasn't smart enough or motivated enough, he had both in heaps. But when it came down to it he just couldn't find his way in the system. He didn't know how to act, didn't know the 'rules', didn't understand the machinations and often radically refused some options offered to him. In short, his problem was that he was unable to cope with the side of things you can't learn in books or high school: how things work outside of the worker's environment. After failing at college he did a string of blue collar jobs like construction work and working as a bouncer, heh.
I notice a similar knee-jerk reflex in my dumb-ass high school trained colleagues: they feel threatened when I engage in or talk about anything having to do with my academic background, often to the point of becoming aggressive in one way or another. They don't know how to imagine it and feel lost (and inferior) when they're put in that position, because nothing ever prepared them for it. Not their family, not their environment, not their teachers. 80% of all my fellow students at Uni had parents who both had academic degrees themselves - so yeah, your background plays a huge role.
Anyway...outliers is a very interesting book, and recommended. Its most important achievement is pointing out the huge role that the factors of chance, background and to just keep on trying play . Success in life is often much more correlated to those influences than any sort of inherent talent. And while willpower is extremely important, it doesn't always mean much when the other factors are lacking (as the Langan story showed).
Thanks for the concise credit rating explanation! I bumped into the term again yesterday when watching a Family Guy episode, when they were talking about who they would rather start a business with and one of them asks 'I dunno, what is his credit rating?'.
So I'm guessing reliability and financial worth for non-extremely rich people is measured almost exclusively by your credit rating in the US?Statistics: Posted by Rinox — Thu Sep 17, 2009 2:14 am
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Re credit rating, basically it's a numerical rating on how reliable you are for having credit given to you. It's tracked by 3 public companies... for the most part, any time you want a credit card, a loan, a car, etc, people will get your credit rating to see if you're "economically reliable" enough to qualify. Things like income are also taken into account.
With a credit rating, your credit goes up as you accumulate and pay off debts. Having several credit cards you use but keep on is a boost to credit rating. Being late on a payment is a negative. etc etc. It has a major effect on people in the US, at least when you're talking about buying stuff that requires a loan.
Statistics: Posted by Satis — Wed Sep 16, 2009 10:27 am
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