While I was reading Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, I was thinking about how it is so irrelevant to my life. It was still interesting though, for the most part. As I thought about it more, I realized I can relate to the book more than I'd like to admit. Gladwell makes some really good points throughout the book.
"By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they performed live an estimated twelve hundred times." (50) I can relate to The Beatles' dedication to doing what they love, and practicing an extreme amount of time to get better. I have my own theory, that no one is particularly born with talent. As I like to say, Jimmy Page didn't come out of the womb improvising the solo to Heartbreaker. I think that people are just born with passion. An old friend of mine, Rachel Gingrich, is a fantastic artist. I was so jealous of her, and I had always envied people who could draw well. I'd always ask her how she became such an expert, and she'd just tell me that she would practice constantly. She showed me the amount of sketchbooks she had gone through, and I completely understood. This also relates to me learning guitar. When I got my first guitar, I didn't play it much. Mostly because I had no idea how. "We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long." (49) The Beatles, as well as myself, were very committed to get better. Once I learned all the basics, I practiced every single day. It's the truth, practice does make perfect. I believe that's one of the main ways to success in anything. Now, like The Beatles were, I am extremely confident, and so proud of myself for coming so far. It feels so good in the end knowing that you've achieved what you thought was the impossible, such as playing all of Stairway To Heaven! Also when I'm done learning a new song, I play it over and over until it's perfect. You have to really love something to be successful at it. I can also relate this to playing lacrosse. I used to love sports a lot more when I was younger. I had played softball until the 5th grade. My brother is very athletic. He plays lacrosse, football and basketball. Lacrosse always seemed like a fun sport, so I gave up softball to attempt to learn. I played youth, and to be honest, I was horrible. I was shy, I had no confidence and my skills and knowledge of the game weren't the best. Eventually, I pushed myself, and I ended up making the modified team both years, as well as the JV team last year.
"Parents with a child born at the end of the calender year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten: it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn't." (28) My birthday is November 4th, 1996. I'm young for my grade, but I'm before the cut-off date so it's okay. My parents decided for me to attend kindergarten instead of holding me back a year, which would make me 16 years old right now. I know plenty of people in my grade who are born in the fall and are already 16, so I guess it was normal for parents to hold their kids back. Anyways, I had difficulties in elementary school. I was mature enough to attend, but some of the material threw me through a loop. I wasn't a good reader at all. I got special help until about third grade. Also, my parents read to me when I was younger all the time, so I always enjoyed reading. I was just having difficulties. Same with math. Math has always been a weak subject for me. I got help with math all the way up until fifth grade. Eventually, I got better at the subjects, and ended up become a really good reader. I still struggle with math sometimes, but I've come a long way. "The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists." (28) I'd like to believe I am at the same level as people as people who are a year old than me, but it's hard. It may just be my self-esteem. I feel like I process things longer than other students. I get decent grades, but I have to work hard for them. Unlike some of my friends, who blow off school, everything comes natural for them. I don't feel the brightest at times when I'm with them. I'm not sure if it's the month I was born in, the age I was sent into kindergarten, or if that's just how I was born.
"But Renee persists. She experiments. She goes back over the same issues time and again. She thinks out loud. She keeps going and going. She simply won't give up." (245) I believe that I am similar to Renee. I hate giving up. It doesn't make me feel good about myself. I like to try new things, and experiment, and learn something. I've had Photoshop for some time now, and I've always wanted to make gifs. Gifs, or .gif images, are moving images. My mom always seems to think that they're videos, but they repeat themselves. One day, I decided to learn. I downloaded KMPlayer, a video hosting program, and figured out how to screen cap part of a video(in my case, a movie). Screen capping takes every frame and puts it into individual pictures, which make up the scene that you're capping. I imported the frames into the animation section, made the .gif without really putting any color, curves or contrast in it. I tried saving it, but when I opened it, it wouldn't play. I was already pretty frustrated to begin with, but I didn't give up. I realized that you have to go to import for web & devices. Once I did that, I saved it, opened it, and it played perfectly. I even made the coloring look really good. So I decided to upload it to tumblr. Once it was uploaded, it wouldn't move again. A few hours had already passed, but I just wanted it to work because I spent so much time on it. Then, I looked at the tumblr rules for .gif images, and they have to be under 500KB. That destroyed me, because it's really hard to make gifs look nice, when they have to be under 500KB. I made it under 500, and made it look the best I could. I'm still learning, but that's something that stuck out in my mind about me not giving up.
I learned a lot from Outliers. It had a lot of interesting theories, some that I agreed with and related to my life, and some that seemed a little ridiculous. It must have taken Malcom Gladwell an extremely long time to write the book, because of all the research he must have had to do(assuming he didn't know all of that before he wrote it). He must have been really determined. I actually prefer non-fiction over fiction, so I enjoyed reading this book.
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