Preparing our Children for Success: The Role of Adversity  (Part 1 - see continuing sections over the next few weeks)

Overview of Talk given at Coffee Connection – January 2010

Today we are going to be considering the role of adversity in shaping our children for success.  So often, in raising our children, our focus is on the positive things that we can do and we forgot the teaching impact of the difficult challenges that our children will go through.

To begin, there are a number of myths to success.  I draw on Malcolm Gladwell author of Outliers, his recent book challenging our assumptions about success.  Gladwell shares the story of covering the junior hockey championships in Canada as a reporter.  As he studied the program for the championships, he noticed something strange about the birthdates of the players involved.  Nearly every single player was born in the first half of the year and most within the first three months of the year. This was not just true for the top two teams, but for all the teams represented at the tournament.

This was a statistical aberration so why was it true?  As he looked into it, he learned that the age cut off for youth hockey, for children as young as 3 or 4 years old, was a birthday of January 1.  Particularly at those young ages children who were close to the birth date were most likely to be bigger, faster and stronger than their age mates who happened to be born at the end of that same calendar year.  These supposed young progenies benefited by a quirk of birth order that gave them an advantage that then turned into an advantage of opportunity.  Children who are successful have doors opened for more practice time, greater competition and better coaching.

Ironically, when Gladwell asked their parents about the reasons for their child’s success, parents attributed it to hard work and good genes.  While they certainly played a role, birth date was by far a greater predictor of success. 

Another myth of success is the relationship between IQ and success.  Gladwell shows evidence that above an IQ threshold of about 130 there is no correlation between IQ and success.  Gladwell shares the story of the man with the highest IQ in the world – a gentleman with an IQ of over 190.  The man spent many years as a bouncer at a bar in Long Island, a day job that allowed him to spend time writing a general theory of the universe.  By no means would he be considered successful in the world’s perspective. 

Our young people can think they are not as smart as their classmates and we know that developmentally they will tend to do that as junior high students.  However, when you consider that most PCA students have IQs about the 130 threshold you realize that they all have the opportunity to succeed, at least as much as it depends on smarts.

Besides these two perspectives, Gladwell also shares what he calls the “rule of 10,000.”  People who have the opportunity to practice something for 10,000 hours are likely to get very good at doing it.  Gladwell shares the story of Bill Gates.  As a high school student, Gates had the good fortune of attending an exclusive private school in Washington state.  The mothers at his school had raised funds to build a technology program.  They purchased terminals that were connected to the mainframe computer at the University of Washington.  Interestingly, if you were a student at the University of Washington at that time, your access to the mainframe computers was limited to certain hours of the day.  There was simply not the capacity to allow as many students to be on it as desired to be on it.  Gates had no such limitation.  For whatever reason, his private school had unlimited 24-hour access to the UW mainframe and Gates made the most of it.  He stayed up late at night programming.  His age worked in his favor.  Someone 10 or 15 years older would have had to earn a living and focus on the tried and true for doing so.  Gates, on the other hand, could get his 10,000 hours of practice on the computer even before he left high school.  By dint of his age and the opportunity to achieve the 10,000 hour rule, Gates had a marked advantage for achieving future success.

Interestingly, Gladwell points out that nearly all the major IT success stories had similar backgrounds and were born within a couple years of each other.  Steve Jobs is a notable example of this.

Gladwell is not the only author to identify myths of success.  The College Board, the company that produces the SAT, the test that students take for college entrance, has conducted research that points out that college success is not highly correlated to SAT scores.  In fact high school grades are a slightly better predictor of college success.  Interestingly, neither SAT scores nor high school grades is better than a 60 percent predictor of college performance.  (to be continued...)