Outliers

     Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell shows a quite realistic viewpoint about success. It emphasizes the importance of hard work, mentioning "the rule of thumb" or "the 10000 hours rule", but at the same time, it also stresses the importance of luck, to be in the right place at the right time. Every single chapter has an episode that shows such thought of the author. Of all, what comes to my head the most is chapter 9, Marita's Bargain.
     The chapter talks about an education system called KIPP. This is a experimental public school education that took place in mid 1990s. Under KIPP, students are expected to work much more than normal students. KIPP class start at 7:25am and they all do a course called thinking skills until 7:45am. They do 90 min of English, 90 min of math everyday. Everyone does orchestra and they leave at 7:oopm. In this way, their learning time is 50-60% more than traditional public school student. In Saturday, they come from 9-1:00 pm and during summer, it is 8-2:00pm. In order to reach school by 7:25 am, kids wake up at 5:45 am and after coming back from school, they study for 3 hours to do their homework. The students showed brilliant advance in mathematics, and this also worked in poor neighborhood in Bronx, but it turned out that during summer, rich kids learned way better than those in the poor neighborhood.
     This actually reminded me of my school, KMLA. We work more and harder than other students. Our good results sort of come from those hard works we do. At the same time, we are "in the right place, in the right time" for our good results. We compete and sometimes cooperate with others, improve ourselves. That is what happens generally in this school. Not only does this atmosphere naturally make us work hard, but it also make others think of us as hard working, brilliant students, sometimes even more than we actually are. That is why our school is the "right place" for us.
     This is sort of like what comes after the story of KIPP: the story about the math olympics. Every year, students who are prized at math olympics are mostly from Singapore, South Korea, China(Taiwan), Hong Kong and Japan. This does not surprise me, but reminds me again of the "right place". It's not that students from those countries are born with brilliant brains that fit mathematics, but that their surrounding make them outperform others in math. This is how "chance", which can never be ignored, works in our lives and our success.