Tim,
Just some thoughts.... I don't see a lazy young man.
Becoming a top prospect requires 1,000's of hours of hard work and practice, practice for years, one reason few achieve success. It's not simply being blessed with birth ability but application of self to hone the ability.
We have a nephew that plays high school baseball. In addition to the high school schedule he plays
fall ball and in the winter he spends part of every week in the batting cage and
weight room and he's only in high school.
It says a lot that he has not appeared to waste the $2M of capital that his earlier efforts have provided. Many young people with similar ability quickly spend the money gained.
"In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. How does Gladwell arrive at this conclusion? And, if the conclusion is true, how can we leverage this idea to achieve greatness in our professions?
Gladwell studied the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved success. This article will review a few examples from Gladwell’s research, and conclude with some thoughts for moving forward.
Violins in Berlin
In the early 1990s, a team of psychologists in Berlin, Germany studied violin students. Specifically, they studied their practice habits in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. All of the subjects were asked this question: “Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?”
All of the violinists had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age twenty, the elite performers averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only 4,000 hours of practice.
The elite had more than double the practice hours of the less capable performers."
I used to be in the music industry and knew many music stars. I was always impressed by their practice schedules and hours.
I'm generally not impressed with the phrase 'giving back', to me giving back implies some measure of owing to another. I am a 'giver' but never do it from the perspective of giving back.
Not that you meant this, but in some measure there is a serious amount of attacking of successful people and companies in this country instead of emulation and praise. I always wonder when I read of real achievers. Here I see a person that probably worked incredibly hard and has a measure of balance in his life.