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Latest read: Bobby Orr – My story

Bobby Orr was my favorite athlete in my childhood growing up in Toledo Ohio. My father watched CBC broadcasts of NHL games and they are some of my earliest recollections of sports. I kinda learned about Bobby and the Boston Bruins from my Dad.

Bobby Orr

His first year playing in Boston was also the year I was born. My knowledge of his skills as a player came later in his career. I recalled later in life learning that my father worked for Storer Broadcasting‘s WSPD-TV station in Toledo. In 1973 Storer purchased the Boston Bruins and the Boston Garden.

After Storer purchased the Bruins my parents went to Boston and my Dad returned home with an official Bruins press kit featuring black and white photos of the team and every player. It was like striking hockey gold for a kid who played hockey in the back yard and on the cement streets around my neighborhood.

Without the internet and cable television it was very rare for me to see the Boston Bruins play on television growing up less than an hour from Detroit, unless it was broadcast with Harry Neale and Ron MacLean.

My interest in hockey began to wain when Bobby left Boston for Chicago while I had just turned ten years old. I remain a Bruins fan but was sorry to see him retire after missing so many years with his bad left knee. By this time I was playing basketball, having never played organized ice hockey and was following Dr. J and the Sixers.  Funny how my Dad played high school basketball with Dr. J’s teammate Steve Mix. My hometown hockey team the Toledo Goaldiggers had a pretty good player for two years as well — Mike Eruzione, yea that Mike Eruzione.

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Design Education Globalization Innovation Reading Technology TED

Latest read: Outliers: The Story of Success

I’m not sure why it took so long to read Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest book Outliers: The Story of Success but I’m sure glad its just as enjoyable as his books The Tipping Point and Blink. As defined scientifically Outliers is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data.  Gladwell not only shares compelling stories regarding outliers, but shines in conveying the impact of globalization for math students, airline pilots and more importantly control tower operators in NYC.

Gladwell shares that “The Story of Success” is really interesting when you dig deep into statistics. Gladwell addresses this with hockey players.  Yes, hockey players.  There is something amazing about playing a game on ice. Hockey requires speed and grace.  The fact that its not played on grass, sand or wood makes you wonder if there is “one talent” shared by the best hockey players in the world.

Researchers found that great players actually all fall within birth dates ranging from January to April for hockey and even for most soccer teams.  And as Gladwell points out the best hockey players like Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretsky, Steve Yzerman, Mario Lemiux and Dominik Hasek all have birth dates that allowed them to play against kids a year younger than them — and to no surprise they were handpicked (at some early stage) to further develop their skills.

Gladwell has taken an interesting angle regarding “success” in what some might even call perfection.  Gladwell tells the story of Bill Joy who not only happened to be at the University of Michigan at the right time (to study computing) but more importantly, took the time to spend countless hours learning and programming when he received access to the mainframe at school.  Actually Gladwell adds up those hours in his chapter called “The 10,000 hour rule” and points out that ‘talent’ can be achieved in 5 years when you practice 5.5 hours everyday.  Once you cross that measurement you have positioned yourself for success. Joy invented BSD Unix and Java.

The same 10,000 hour rule even applied to The Beatles who “had to play for 8 hours” in a strip club in Germany before crossing the Atlantic and ultimately rock n roll fame.  Can you imaging some chap telling his wife he saw them play for hours and hours…funny, but true.  Wonder what the impact would have been in America if word had gotten out about how they perfected their music?