Quote:
“They were all scholarship recipients, former paratroopers and translators who were becoming teachers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted” (Epstein 10).
Comment:
In our world if you don’t know what you are doing right away and stick with it one is normally looked down upon. For example, when people ask me what my major is and I respond with undecided, a lot of people then look at me with a discouraged face. They say: that’s a major? Or you better figure out what you want to do quick! Even though I am only 18 years old people expect me to have my whole life planned out. On the other hand, once adults have a career path they are looked down upon if they want to change their mind. Even though these people are highly accomplished, when they want to try something new and other than what they specialize in, the whole world gets turned upside down. There is a fear in starting something new that has been conditioned in society for years. Just because they don’t fit in with societies standard people are afraid to go out and do what they really love. Society is afraid of change and unfortunately judges people when they do decide to change anyways. However, it is truly important that we are able to realize our wrongs and try to change the way that we think about change.
Question:
How did we get to a point in life where it is discouraged to start new beginnings?
Relating back to DFW, how can we change how people think about starting new?
Quote:
“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a ‘sampling period.’ They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area” (pg. 7).
Comment:
This quote captured my attention because I relate to it on a personal level. I was a very active kid growing up who could never sit still, always wanted to be busy, and became bored very easily. Throughout my childhood I played almost all of the sports and other activities my town had to offer, and could never pick just one or two activities that were my favorite. Over the years I played soccer, basketball, gymnastics, swim team, softball, the piano, the ukulele, joined tons of clubs and did art. It wasn’t until later in high school that I started to pick out my favorite things to do and start to focus on specific activities. I liked this idea of “late specialization” that the author wrote about, and how he emphasized that not knowing what you want to do is perfectly okay. In fact, Epstein wrote how some of the best athletes are ones who did not specialize in one thing at a young age, and instead jumped around between different sports to broaden their horizons. I related to this because my parents always encouraged me to try different things, and if I didn’t like something, then I could always try something new.
Question:
How do you know when specialization is needed?
Quote – “His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. ‘He has a larger forum than all of them,’ he said. ‘He’s the bridge between the East and West. There is no limit because he has the guidance’” (Epstein 2).
Comment – When reading, this quote surprised me and almost made me laugh. Why would a father apply so much pressure on his son? As an athlete, being compared and regarded as more important than people with such a wide-spread effect on the world. This quote seems to be a representation of the father’s own ego. He takes credit for being the guidance that his son needs, and is subconsciously taking credit for his son’s ability. This quote seems damaging to his son by giving him an unrealistic threshold for his impact on the world. If I were this kid, I would be overwhelmed with anxiety and stress to fulfill my fathers dream. It is unfair to establish someone as something they are not, even if the father just has high hopes for his son, his statement seems extreme. This seems important to his son’s development and it seems to not have affected him because he is now a great athlete who has made a huge impact on the world. It is interesting to see how even if this quote could very much damage his son and his future, it instead seemed to have been true for the father to an extent.
Question – In the long run, did this quote help or harm the son’s development as a person and an athlete?
Quote: “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse
experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that
increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.” (Epstein 14)
Comment: This quote captured my attention because it simply summarized the chapter. Of course there will always be instances where someone specializes in one thing at an early age and ends up being very successful. But, more often than not, trying out new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work is a very important part of our development. This quote brought up a great question in which I think we will be partially solving during our time in GUST. How do we benefit from not knowing what we want to do with our lives? This is a question that will be very important during our time as a student in college.
Question: Where do we even start in the process of not knowing what we want to do? What benefits can come from delayed concentration? Could it be possible that not specializing in one thing be harmful to our future?
“By three, the boy was learning how to play out of a “sand twap,” and his father was mapping out his destiny. He knew his son had been chosen for this and that it was his duty to guide him”
Comment
The quote spoke to me because of how young Tiger Woods was when he was able to figure out how to swing a club, and it also spoke to me about how confident Tiger’s father was about his son’s talent and future success. Tiger Woods was only about ten months old when he was taught how to putt. Tiger was not even old enough to speak when he began to figure out how to putt. He imitated his father’s form before he was even one year old, and at just four years old he was going to golf courses for eight hours a day and making money by winning bets with random golfers he met while out on the course. The quote tells how his father had already accepted how talented his son is, and how he must guide his life path. His father made it his life mission to do everything he can to help Tiger become a professional golfer.
Question
How good was Tiger when he was four? To clarify, was he hitting the ball far, or was he hitting the ball accurately? What was he doing to win bets against other golfers? Was he playing against them and winning or was he making trick shots?
Quote:
“I was slightly bemused to find that a former Navy SEAL with an undergraduate degree in history and geophysics pursuing graduate degrees in business and geographics from Dartmouth and Harvard could feel behind. But like the others in the room, he had been told, implicitly or explicitly that changing directions was dangerous.
Comment: This quote resonated with me as I feel that often times we are told change is dangerous. As an Undeclared major, i’ve experienced it first hand. Over the last year i’ve been asked countless times what I was majoring in, or what I wanted to do for work, or even what my interest were. And to all of those questions my answer was always the same; “I don’t know.” This answer was often times met confusion. Why would I be going spending all this money to go to college if I had no clue what for? I believe that just like the Navy SEAL, who decided half way through his life what he wanted to do moving forward, my interests are ever changing. I spent a large part of my life hopping from sport to sport, trying to find something that felt like the right fit for me. As I grew, so did my interests, and that prompted change. Truthfully, taking that leap of faith to the unknown, wether it be a new career like the Navy SEAL, or sports like me, is often times the best thing to do for ones future. Hearing that most people who excel in their fields, normally had little interest in it at first, or prioritized other interests over the one they do so well in is reassuring. It shows that it’s never too late to make a change, and often times that change is for the best.
Questions:
Where did the stigma surrounding change start? Who is keeping it alive, and why?
Are there as many stories of failure of people who make a change late in their lives as there are success stories? Are there more? Less?
Are all of the authors claims backed by credible studies?
Quote: “When the boy was four, his father could drop him off at a golf course at nine in the morning and pick him up eight hours later, sometimes with money he’d won from those foolish enough to doubt” Epstein 2. This stood out to me because he’s 4 years old at a golf course by himself, winning money from other people. It’s crazy how gifted some kids can be. I could barely walk when I was four years old. At eight years old, he beat his father in golf for the first time which is just amazing.
Question: This writing about Roger makes me wonder how good Tiger was at golf when he was four. Did he play golf when he was four? How far could he hit the ball?
Comment
This quote caught my attention because it is the name of the book and I was wondering why it was called range, but know I know. Also being in college were it seems like I should know what I want to do and stick with that for the rest of my life, seems like something I don’t want to do. The quote and the first chapter mean a lot to me because I know knowing more about different things can give me skills I would have never learned if I didn’t do something different. I had been playing sports my entire life up until freshman year when I pick theatre. From that one thing I changed in my life, I know know so much more than I would have from just playing sports. I’m not saying sports won’t teach you anything, but for me I have learned more about life without playing sports when I was told that I would learn so much by playing them.
Question
Why do we push the youth to already know what they want to do at the age of 17-22? If we want the next generation to have range, then why force them to work a 9-5 on something they don’t even like?
Quote:
“Still, the contrast was not lost on Federer. ‘His story is completely different from mine,’ he told a biographer in 2006. ‘Even as a kid his goal was to break the record for winning the most majors.’’
Comment:
In the hockey world, it is always emphasized that everybody takes their own path to where they want to be, there is never a direct line that everybody takes. This is something that has been engraved in my mind since I first heard it, and it’s interesting to see two of sport’s greatests really embody that. It’s an ideal that’s really important to me because I’ve witnessed it first hand, seeing my friends go off to bigger and better things before me. The quote really held true in the end though, as our end goals were achieved regardless of the path we took.
I think it’s also really interesting that Federer mentions what Tiger’s goals were. Being the greatest of all time was pretty much on his horizon from day one. Roger on the other hand, was embracing his diverse experiences and would’ve been happy with just meeting the former world number one. This quote really stresses the fact that the Roger path, despite many beliefs, can work just as well as the Tiger path.
Question:
Do you think one path is better than the other?
Which path did you find yourself on growing up?
If Roger and Tiger switched paths, do you think they’d still both end up being greats?
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of Breadth(Range), diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in the world that increasingly incentivize, even demands, hyper specialization.”
Comment-
I chose this quote because I think what he is saying here are all important aspects to have in your life especially if your someone with obligations or who is of some importance like Tiger, If you don’t fully understand your abilities or how you think/manage yourself you will never play, act, or be the best you can at something, but if you are able to “Maintain Breadth” and manage your time and yourself/performance you can be great at whatever you do.
Question-
If you were to start to master these things at a young age and fully understand yourself and what he’s talking about here how good of a person and or athlete would you be able to become
QUOTE: “They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted. They were anxious starting grad school alongside younger (sometimes much younger) students, or changing lanes later than their peers, all because they had been busy accumulating inimitable life and leadership experiences. Somehow, a unique advantage had morphed in their heads into a liability” (Epstein 10).
COMMENT: This quote really resonated with me because for the past couple of years in high school I always felt like I was behind everyone else who was figuring out what they wanted to do in college. I would become discouraged because I was thinking about myself and what I was interested in just as much as they were, but nothing stood out to me. I was always afraid of being stuck in one job for the rest of my life doing something I wasn’t passionate about. Seeing this quote and knowing that there are people much older than me who are still figuring out what they want to do in life is reassuring to me that I’m not really falling behind. At the same time, these people still feel like they’re behind, so I wonder if by their age I will still have this awful feeling that I don’t know who or what I want to be. I do hope at least I will have the resources when I’m older to still explore other kinds of jobs once I am out of college.
QUESTION: How is starting to find out what you want to do or starting your career later a unique advantage like Epstein says it is?
“Starting something new in the middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerburg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech teacher who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than aa twenty-year-old”
This quote stuck out to me, the reason he says that younger people are smarter since they’re more likely to be fresh out of their education. Except older people within the 10 year span are more likely to go out and do something, since they have the experience of doing something and having it fail. Younger people are afraid of failure since the whole idea of trying something new could be challenging once the pressure is put on their shoulders. Older people with more experience are more accepting of failure since they’ve lived and learned from their past.
Quote: “But like the others in the room, he had been told, implicitly or explicitly, that changing directions was dangerous.” pg. 11
In context, this quote is talking about changing and exploring different majors and careers even after one was chosen. Once the author had given a speech to the Tillman Foundation group, which was a group of Navy SEALS, they felt inspired to follow their true desires and be okay with the unknown of switching careers. Even though this specific Navy SEAL had been pursuing graduate degrees from Harvard, he still felt lost in his ways.
Comment: This quote caught my attention because I was able to relate to it, as I am sure most others in GUST can also. We are in this class because we came into school undeclared, not knowing exactly what we want to do with our lives. We have been told by some that being undecided is a bad thing and we should know what major we want to pursue, but by others we have been told it is right to not have a clue what we want to do at 18 years old. This quote is important to understand because we should not be afraid of the unknown or switching majors in school. If a person thinks they want to pursue one career their first year, and then changes their mind and wants to invest in something else, they absolutely can and should do so.
Question: One of the big questions I have is, why is a Navy SEAL afraid to change careers especially if they are extremely intelligent? What did the reader say in his speech to inspire him this much?
“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period”. They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.” – Page 7.
COMMENT
This quote caught my attention because when I encounter someone who is incredibly talented in a specific area, I usually assume that they’ve spent the majority of their free time practicing it; that they’ve dedicated their energy to that one specific talent. I think it’s very interesting that these “elites” have not experienced intense structure and training from an early age, and they’ve gained their skills from a variety of areas. Perhaps these other sports that they’ve dabbled in contributed to their overall success and skill. The book mentioned that Roger developed his footwork and hand-eye coordination in some of the other sports he participated in. I find it interesting that if, theoretically, tennis did not work out for him, he would most likely be just as successful had he focused on a different sport that was part of his ‘range.’
QUESTION
How would society work today if more people were encouraged to enhance their skills in more than one area? Is it beneficial for people such as doctors and surgeons to focus on and perfect their skills in just one area?
14 thoughts on “JOURNAL # 3”
Quote:
“They were all scholarship recipients, former paratroopers and translators who were becoming teachers, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted” (Epstein 10).
Comment:
In our world if you don’t know what you are doing right away and stick with it one is normally looked down upon. For example, when people ask me what my major is and I respond with undecided, a lot of people then look at me with a discouraged face. They say: that’s a major? Or you better figure out what you want to do quick! Even though I am only 18 years old people expect me to have my whole life planned out. On the other hand, once adults have a career path they are looked down upon if they want to change their mind. Even though these people are highly accomplished, when they want to try something new and other than what they specialize in, the whole world gets turned upside down. There is a fear in starting something new that has been conditioned in society for years. Just because they don’t fit in with societies standard people are afraid to go out and do what they really love. Society is afraid of change and unfortunately judges people when they do decide to change anyways. However, it is truly important that we are able to realize our wrongs and try to change the way that we think about change.
Question:
How did we get to a point in life where it is discouraged to start new beginnings?
Relating back to DFW, how can we change how people think about starting new?
Quote:
“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a ‘sampling period.’ They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area” (pg. 7).
Comment:
This quote captured my attention because I relate to it on a personal level. I was a very active kid growing up who could never sit still, always wanted to be busy, and became bored very easily. Throughout my childhood I played almost all of the sports and other activities my town had to offer, and could never pick just one or two activities that were my favorite. Over the years I played soccer, basketball, gymnastics, swim team, softball, the piano, the ukulele, joined tons of clubs and did art. It wasn’t until later in high school that I started to pick out my favorite things to do and start to focus on specific activities. I liked this idea of “late specialization” that the author wrote about, and how he emphasized that not knowing what you want to do is perfectly okay. In fact, Epstein wrote how some of the best athletes are ones who did not specialize in one thing at a young age, and instead jumped around between different sports to broaden their horizons. I related to this because my parents always encouraged me to try different things, and if I didn’t like something, then I could always try something new.
Question:
How do you know when specialization is needed?
Quote – “His son would have a larger impact than Nelson Mandela, than Gandhi, than Buddha, he insisted. ‘He has a larger forum than all of them,’ he said. ‘He’s the bridge between the East and West. There is no limit because he has the guidance’” (Epstein 2).
Comment – When reading, this quote surprised me and almost made me laugh. Why would a father apply so much pressure on his son? As an athlete, being compared and regarded as more important than people with such a wide-spread effect on the world. This quote seems to be a representation of the father’s own ego. He takes credit for being the guidance that his son needs, and is subconsciously taking credit for his son’s ability. This quote seems damaging to his son by giving him an unrealistic threshold for his impact on the world. If I were this kid, I would be overwhelmed with anxiety and stress to fulfill my fathers dream. It is unfair to establish someone as something they are not, even if the father just has high hopes for his son, his statement seems extreme. This seems important to his son’s development and it seems to not have affected him because he is now a great athlete who has made a huge impact on the world. It is interesting to see how even if this quote could very much damage his son and his future, it instead seemed to have been true for the father to an extent.
Question – In the long run, did this quote help or harm the son’s development as a person and an athlete?
Quote: “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse
experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that
increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.” (Epstein 14)
Comment: This quote captured my attention because it simply summarized the chapter. Of course there will always be instances where someone specializes in one thing at an early age and ends up being very successful. But, more often than not, trying out new things and seeing what works and what doesn’t work is a very important part of our development. This quote brought up a great question in which I think we will be partially solving during our time in GUST. How do we benefit from not knowing what we want to do with our lives? This is a question that will be very important during our time as a student in college.
Question: Where do we even start in the process of not knowing what we want to do? What benefits can come from delayed concentration? Could it be possible that not specializing in one thing be harmful to our future?
“By three, the boy was learning how to play out of a “sand twap,” and his father was mapping out his destiny. He knew his son had been chosen for this and that it was his duty to guide him”
Comment
The quote spoke to me because of how young Tiger Woods was when he was able to figure out how to swing a club, and it also spoke to me about how confident Tiger’s father was about his son’s talent and future success. Tiger Woods was only about ten months old when he was taught how to putt. Tiger was not even old enough to speak when he began to figure out how to putt. He imitated his father’s form before he was even one year old, and at just four years old he was going to golf courses for eight hours a day and making money by winning bets with random golfers he met while out on the course. The quote tells how his father had already accepted how talented his son is, and how he must guide his life path. His father made it his life mission to do everything he can to help Tiger become a professional golfer.
Question
How good was Tiger when he was four? To clarify, was he hitting the ball far, or was he hitting the ball accurately? What was he doing to win bets against other golfers? Was he playing against them and winning or was he making trick shots?
Quote:
“I was slightly bemused to find that a former Navy SEAL with an undergraduate degree in history and geophysics pursuing graduate degrees in business and geographics from Dartmouth and Harvard could feel behind. But like the others in the room, he had been told, implicitly or explicitly that changing directions was dangerous.
Comment: This quote resonated with me as I feel that often times we are told change is dangerous. As an Undeclared major, i’ve experienced it first hand. Over the last year i’ve been asked countless times what I was majoring in, or what I wanted to do for work, or even what my interest were. And to all of those questions my answer was always the same; “I don’t know.” This answer was often times met confusion. Why would I be going spending all this money to go to college if I had no clue what for? I believe that just like the Navy SEAL, who decided half way through his life what he wanted to do moving forward, my interests are ever changing. I spent a large part of my life hopping from sport to sport, trying to find something that felt like the right fit for me. As I grew, so did my interests, and that prompted change. Truthfully, taking that leap of faith to the unknown, wether it be a new career like the Navy SEAL, or sports like me, is often times the best thing to do for ones future. Hearing that most people who excel in their fields, normally had little interest in it at first, or prioritized other interests over the one they do so well in is reassuring. It shows that it’s never too late to make a change, and often times that change is for the best.
Questions:
Where did the stigma surrounding change start? Who is keeping it alive, and why?
Are there as many stories of failure of people who make a change late in their lives as there are success stories? Are there more? Less?
Are all of the authors claims backed by credible studies?
Quote: “When the boy was four, his father could drop him off at a golf course at nine in the morning and pick him up eight hours later, sometimes with money he’d won from those foolish enough to doubt” Epstein 2. This stood out to me because he’s 4 years old at a golf course by himself, winning money from other people. It’s crazy how gifted some kids can be. I could barely walk when I was four years old. At eight years old, he beat his father in golf for the first time which is just amazing.
Question: This writing about Roger makes me wonder how good Tiger was at golf when he was four. Did he play golf when he was four? How far could he hit the ball?
Quote
“People with range”(Epstein 14)
Comment
This quote caught my attention because it is the name of the book and I was wondering why it was called range, but know I know. Also being in college were it seems like I should know what I want to do and stick with that for the rest of my life, seems like something I don’t want to do. The quote and the first chapter mean a lot to me because I know knowing more about different things can give me skills I would have never learned if I didn’t do something different. I had been playing sports my entire life up until freshman year when I pick theatre. From that one thing I changed in my life, I know know so much more than I would have from just playing sports. I’m not saying sports won’t teach you anything, but for me I have learned more about life without playing sports when I was told that I would learn so much by playing them.
Question
Why do we push the youth to already know what they want to do at the age of 17-22? If we want the next generation to have range, then why force them to work a 9-5 on something they don’t even like?
Quote:
“Still, the contrast was not lost on Federer. ‘His story is completely different from mine,’ he told a biographer in 2006. ‘Even as a kid his goal was to break the record for winning the most majors.’’
Comment:
In the hockey world, it is always emphasized that everybody takes their own path to where they want to be, there is never a direct line that everybody takes. This is something that has been engraved in my mind since I first heard it, and it’s interesting to see two of sport’s greatests really embody that. It’s an ideal that’s really important to me because I’ve witnessed it first hand, seeing my friends go off to bigger and better things before me. The quote really held true in the end though, as our end goals were achieved regardless of the path we took.
I think it’s also really interesting that Federer mentions what Tiger’s goals were. Being the greatest of all time was pretty much on his horizon from day one. Roger on the other hand, was embracing his diverse experiences and would’ve been happy with just meeting the former world number one. This quote really stresses the fact that the Roger path, despite many beliefs, can work just as well as the Tiger path.
Question:
Do you think one path is better than the other?
Which path did you find yourself on growing up?
If Roger and Tiger switched paths, do you think they’d still both end up being greats?
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of Breadth(Range), diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in the world that increasingly incentivize, even demands, hyper specialization.”
Comment-
I chose this quote because I think what he is saying here are all important aspects to have in your life especially if your someone with obligations or who is of some importance like Tiger, If you don’t fully understand your abilities or how you think/manage yourself you will never play, act, or be the best you can at something, but if you are able to “Maintain Breadth” and manage your time and yourself/performance you can be great at whatever you do.
Question-
If you were to start to master these things at a young age and fully understand yourself and what he’s talking about here how good of a person and or athlete would you be able to become
QUOTE: “They brimmed with enthusiasm, but rippled with an undercurrent of fear. Their LinkedIn profiles didn’t show the linear progression toward a particular career they had been told employers wanted. They were anxious starting grad school alongside younger (sometimes much younger) students, or changing lanes later than their peers, all because they had been busy accumulating inimitable life and leadership experiences. Somehow, a unique advantage had morphed in their heads into a liability” (Epstein 10).
COMMENT: This quote really resonated with me because for the past couple of years in high school I always felt like I was behind everyone else who was figuring out what they wanted to do in college. I would become discouraged because I was thinking about myself and what I was interested in just as much as they were, but nothing stood out to me. I was always afraid of being stuck in one job for the rest of my life doing something I wasn’t passionate about. Seeing this quote and knowing that there are people much older than me who are still figuring out what they want to do in life is reassuring to me that I’m not really falling behind. At the same time, these people still feel like they’re behind, so I wonder if by their age I will still have this awful feeling that I don’t know who or what I want to be. I do hope at least I will have the resources when I’m older to still explore other kinds of jobs once I am out of college.
QUESTION: How is starting to find out what you want to do or starting your career later a unique advantage like Epstein says it is?
“Starting something new in the middle age might look that way too. Mark Zuckerburg famously noted that “young people are just smarter.” And yet a tech teacher who is fifty years old is nearly twice as likely to start a blockbuster company as one who is thirty, and the thirty-year-old has a better shot than aa twenty-year-old”
This quote stuck out to me, the reason he says that younger people are smarter since they’re more likely to be fresh out of their education. Except older people within the 10 year span are more likely to go out and do something, since they have the experience of doing something and having it fail. Younger people are afraid of failure since the whole idea of trying something new could be challenging once the pressure is put on their shoulders. Older people with more experience are more accepting of failure since they’ve lived and learned from their past.
Quote: “But like the others in the room, he had been told, implicitly or explicitly, that changing directions was dangerous.” pg. 11
In context, this quote is talking about changing and exploring different majors and careers even after one was chosen. Once the author had given a speech to the Tillman Foundation group, which was a group of Navy SEALS, they felt inspired to follow their true desires and be okay with the unknown of switching careers. Even though this specific Navy SEAL had been pursuing graduate degrees from Harvard, he still felt lost in his ways.
Comment: This quote caught my attention because I was able to relate to it, as I am sure most others in GUST can also. We are in this class because we came into school undeclared, not knowing exactly what we want to do with our lives. We have been told by some that being undecided is a bad thing and we should know what major we want to pursue, but by others we have been told it is right to not have a clue what we want to do at 18 years old. This quote is important to understand because we should not be afraid of the unknown or switching majors in school. If a person thinks they want to pursue one career their first year, and then changes their mind and wants to invest in something else, they absolutely can and should do so.
Question: One of the big questions I have is, why is a Navy SEAL afraid to change careers especially if they are extremely intelligent? What did the reader say in his speech to inspire him this much?
QUOTE
“Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period”. They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.” – Page 7.
COMMENT
This quote caught my attention because when I encounter someone who is incredibly talented in a specific area, I usually assume that they’ve spent the majority of their free time practicing it; that they’ve dedicated their energy to that one specific talent. I think it’s very interesting that these “elites” have not experienced intense structure and training from an early age, and they’ve gained their skills from a variety of areas. Perhaps these other sports that they’ve dabbled in contributed to their overall success and skill. The book mentioned that Roger developed his footwork and hand-eye coordination in some of the other sports he participated in. I find it interesting that if, theoretically, tennis did not work out for him, he would most likely be just as successful had he focused on a different sport that was part of his ‘range.’
QUESTION
How would society work today if more people were encouraged to enhance their skills in more than one area? Is it beneficial for people such as doctors and surgeons to focus on and perfect their skills in just one area?