Gladwell On Sports Success: Blame Your Birthday
Why aren’t you a professional hockey player? For one, because you suck at hockey. But also — and this is where it gets tricky — because you weren’t born in the appropriate set of circumstances. More specifically: You weren’t born in January.
That’s the convincing argument Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, makes in its first chapter. Being an intellectually curious individual, and also a douchebag, I bought Outliers yesterday, and was pleased to find Gladwell using sports to set up his book’s thesis almost immediately. (Pleased not only because it was interesting, but because I knew I could blog about it. This is what my life has come to.)
Anyway, I could attempt to sum up the chapter, but David Leonhardt’s New York Times review has already done as much. Here it is:
The book’s first chapter explores the anomaly of hockey players’ birthdays. In many of the best leagues in the world, amateur or professional, roughly 40 percent of the players were born in January, February or March, while only 10 percent were born in October, November or December. It’s a profoundly strange pattern, with a simple explanation. The cutoff birth date for many youth hockey leagues is Jan. 1. So the children born in the first three months of the year are just a little older, bigger and stronger than their peers. These older children are then funneled into all-star teams that offer the best, most intense training. By the time they become teenagers, their random initial advantage has turned into a real one.
In other words, children with an eight-month advantage in their early years end up snowballing that advantage — they’re given advanced training, are sent to the best elite camps, and are given greater chances than those players merely considered “good.” By the end of their adolescence, these players have become a self-fulfilled prophecy; because coaches thought they were the best players when they were really only the biggest, they end up becoming the best players. Whether or not they were actually better at the beginning of the process no longer matters; they’re better now, and for reasons beyond hard work, discipline, and talent.
Gladwell argues that hockey leagues in Canada — and various youth leagues in the U.S. — should be splitting their leagues up by birthday. That way, leagues could allow players to develop against players of a similar age range and theoretically create twice as many potential future pros. As it is, Canadian hockey is wasting half of their talent pool by discarding them too early.
So, if you’re wondering why you’re not an All-Star baseball player, you have something besides “you suck” to fall back on. You can blame your birthday.
And … that is your quasi-intellectual sports summation of the day. Back to arguing about the BCS now.
Addendum: It should be noted that there is one American sport most immune to this weeding effect, and that’s basketball. Because there are so fewer barriers to entry than hockey or baseball or even soccer — basketball courts are everywhere, lots of people want to play, inexpensive, etc. — skill on the basketball court trends toward egalitarianism. Yet another reason why basketball is better than hockey.
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Good luck also are happy! Give birth easily and independently! Let not doctors give birth for you, and you!
Also adjust itself on chest feeding of the kid! Read the necessary information!
Be, lovely pregnant mums and expecting posterities of the daddy, are healthy and wise!
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