Why i wish i had a degree in ...

I've been thinking a lot during finals time. and graduation time. and all of my thinking boils down to this. i went to law school because i had nothing better to do. i was too scared to go out into the market with an English degree (and no debt!!).

[read: uncertainty > going to law school]

more importantly, i had parents who told me that my dreams would never make me money. and a woman has to be self-sufficient. while, i agree with the second point, I really wanted to do graphic design work - and it seems like those jobs would be easy to find nowadays.

[read: instinct is good; following parents bad]

but i'm not blaming them. they told me to go to business school...i'm good at math. but what teenager likes to listen to her parents (my 21 year old self should've learned from my 19 year old self)? That's why i *forced* myself to be an English major. plus, b/c i like to "grow" (read: take the hard path), i needed to practice the skills i was bad at. but, now, i'm "practiced" in writing papers...which i hate... and i've lost my touch for math...which i used to love... (minus my Sudoku races with Kirk, which isn't really about math, i'm not forced to think in terms of numbers...although i *always* win!!)

[read: be true to yourself!]

anyway, here's to thinking before jumping in. which is why i am glad that i have no fucking idea what i am doing after i pass the bar. b/c whatever i'm going to do with my life, will necessarily have to be something that i love to "deliberately practice."

[read: truism, not justification]


NYTimes Article: A Star is Made

The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

What might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from 7 to 20," Ericsson recalls. "He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory itself is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one. In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person "encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

[read: i needed the first part of the article to give the bolded part context...but you can skim over that...]