Harry Potter Series Fails to Cast a Spell

The first part of the final Harry Potter movie held par with it’s predecessors; that is to say, the events that occurred in the book were made into scenes using the films sizable (read: limitless) budget to make these scenes as visually appealing as those in a reader’s imagination. And throughout the Harry Potter movies, the scenes and characters have been impressively visually comparable to those that most had conjured personally while reading Rowling’s brilliant epics. The problem, perhaps, is that beyond charming accents, good casting, and shiploads of money with which to build giant chess sets and convincing dragons, the love with which the books were crafted is completely absent from every film. While Harry Potter in text is as comforting as the vividly described Butter Beer and as thrilling as the suspense filled Quidditch matches, Harry Potter in cinema is more like a really well done action figure - an extremely obvious extension of a multi-billion dollar franchise. The scenes are moved through, the plot points hit, the personalities well matched, and the films are over. Even people who claim to enjoy the movies nearly as much as the books can’t seem to name one stand out event between eight (seven and a half?) movies. Alright, so Hollywood is as much a business as Bill and Bob’s Discount Furniture, and at the end of the day, blockbusters aim to make a buck, but does David Yates have to be quite so obvious about it? At least when he’s playing with the hearts of children.. and teens.. and young twenty somethings.. okay, everyone, because the books are some of the most engaging and unifying pieces of art in creation. No scene seems to take precedence over another, there are no definable climaxes, the soundtrack is nearly non-existent apart from the admittedly good instrumental during the beginning credits, and no event seemed to garner more passionate attention than any other. It’s assembly line film reel, a video game with decent graphics, and more money in the bank.

The latest of theseries, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I, is as visually gripping as the rest. And, okay, it was fun to see our heroines grow up, but at no point did I feel part of this wizarding world, which at the end of the day, was the most brilliant ability of the novels. The story seems to be told by an outsider, a parent who has heard about the majesty of Hogwarts and the detestability of the Malfoys from an excited kid, and chuckled in appreciation before figuring out how to turn this joy into a business. There were times when I found myself stuffing popcorn into my mouth to avoid screaming at the imaginary man behind the screen committing these egregious creative faux pas. Anyone who’s read Harry Potter knows of the deep attachments you develop to all of the characters, human or otherwise, so when the death and mourning of Harry’s beloved owl Hedwig (spoiler alert..?) is given a total of ten seconds of screen time in the film’s first scenes, you can bet I was doing a lot of chewing. Or when the horrors committed by Voldemort are breezed over in the paper and then discussed with a logic more reminiscent of Law and Order SVU than anything that J.K. Rowling has ever put on paper, I nearly had to excuse myself to use the bathroom. This is the DARK LORD! The murderer of millions and, worse yet, Harry’s PARENTS! Dumbledore is DEAD and Harry is being hunted like a prized quail! I could see the angry kid stomping at his father’s lack of understanding while dad typed down some general notes on these popular books for tykes, to turn into a screen play.

Don’t get me wrong, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is not a bad movie. Especially when aided by the glory of a real IMAX theater, but it’s not a memorable one either. Movies that are based on books are always going to have a tough act to follow. Add to this the fact that they are criticized not only for their shortcomings as films, but for their shortcomings as books (which they are not) and, well, it’s an impressive movie that makes the cut. I realize this, and don’t aim to watch Yates’ films with a constant comparison going in my mind. And it's not as though Yates is failing to live up to the directors who've worked on the series before him, all of whom seem afflicted with the same lack of attachment to the story. The issue is that, books aside, any cinematic experience that is going to earn acclaim needs to at least appear as though someone cared about it. Harry Potter on the screen has not done so thus far, and if by some miracle, Part II of the Deathly Hallows is the final installment that suddenly feels like watching a movie that a director, producer, or screen writer was actually inspired to make, I’ll give it due credit. But so far, so consistent, and let’s just say that the DVDs wont be stacked next to most peoples collection of Rowling’s books in years to come.

Inception: Beginning - and Ending - in the Mind

So. Inception. Freaking Inception. Well. I liked it. It was a well done film; the premise was original, the relationships weren’t tried and tired dynamics, the cinematography was excellent, and the exhibited attention to detail left those who had hoped to find the flaws in the fabric unsatisfied. So, yeah, good, cool. Perhaps I was being naive, overly hopeful, in even imagining that Inception might be the new, and long overdue, cult classic of a generation. I mean, it’s been years since we’ve seen even a decent sequel to a cult classic. But at the end of the day, neat as it was, that is what it was. Neat. Smart. An external labyrinth, but not a film that forces the already existing labyrinth that is a viewers mind to alter, shift, in other words, not a film that blew my mind.

Now, I acknowledge that this was good stuff. I mean, again, I liked Inception. But it was about half way through the film that I realized, I wasn’t waiting for the DVD release. I wasn’t planning on quoting the film, on watching it until I knew every scene shift like the back of my hand. Honestly, if I even see it again, it will probably just be in the hopes of catching a mistake (yes, I am one of these obnoxious movie goers). Of course, who cares really, it was a good movie and it was my own decision to hope that it might be deeply impacting. Nolan could have had no intention beyond making a Rubik’s Cube of a flick, and if this is the case, mission accomplished. The acting was solid, the mood was total and consistent, the idea was gripping. When I got up from my leather, speaker containing, IMAX seat, compliments of the Jordan boys, I wondered why I didn’t feel more. And that’s when the issue at hand dawned on me: because I hadn’t really felt anything for the duration of the movie.

Perhaps it will be easier to understand if we think of Inception as a food, something packaged - like Tofu Pops - with a neat little label on the back. Inception delivered about 250% of a daily thought dose, but hovered around 20% so far as daily emotional experience was concerned, and hardly contained .5 grams of passion. This is most likely because the “world of the dream” that fuels Inception’s plot, is larger in scope that the world of the film itself. There are plenty of abstract movies that move people, leave a tattoo as opposed to an entrance stamp, because they touch upon the themes that we humans seem to get rocked by no matter how many times they’re thrown in our face; freedom, justice, love. These themes manifest in their most rebellious nature in movies like The Matrix, their most proud and valiant in war movies like Braveheart; their most intense in epics like Gladiator, and their most heart wrenching in love stories like The Notebook (don’t pretend that one’s not going down in history). Inception managed, impressively enough, to evade just about all of these themes. It lacked in pragmatism to an impressive extent. And as cool and out of the box as I may have previously considered myself, I realized that at the end of the day I’m a die-hard Disney fan who feels like I missed half the food pyramid for a day if fear, hierarchy, love, belief, and all the rest of that mumbo jumbo, isn’t touched upon at least a little bit.

In conclusion: Inception was awesome, see it. But unless you’re more of a left brained cookie, you probably wont consider it the stuff of legend. Then again, if you are a dweller of the left-ern hemisphere, you probably wont walk into the theater with the expectation.

Eclipsing Stubborn Resistance: The Twilight Saga Delivers

From the obnoxiously persistent tabloid coverage of the Pattinson-Stewart dating saga, to the recent Globe pictures of Vampire happy fans who showed up ten hours before the midnight premier, I was relatively determined to avoid seeing Eclipse at all costs months before its release. This third of the Twilight saga had, in my opinion, taken what was a first book I had yet to finish and a first movie which was entertaining though not especially impacting, beyond the brink of reason. When I heard that there were theaters showing all three films back to back with brief intermissions to refill on popcorn and tissues, my decision became a stone engraved stance against a nation-wide addiction. I expected to write a review of the future books presenting twelve step Twilight Detox programs before a review of one of these films. And yet - I saw Eclipse. No, worse. I saw Eclipse, and despite my most violent efforts to feel otherwise, acknowledged that it was a good freaking movie.

The same Globe article that introduced me to the world of faux fang sporting super fans, informed me that 30% of the audience members who made Eclipse the second biggest movie opening ever, were male. This aids my confidence in believing that despite the film’s two abnormally appealing leading men, the base plot holds value for both sexes. Yes, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner happen to be of the rare breed that may be capable of getting away with a good 20 minutes of screen time speaking in pig-latin before any heterosexual female employed senses beyond sight enough to notice.

This oversight, however, wasn’t necessary (assuming that this didn’t occur for less than the allotted twenty minutes and, therefore, evade my radar). Both actors were adept at truly embodying their characters, enough so to make their joint obsession with our favorite misfit heroin Bella (Kristen Stewart) moving despite its occasional ridiculousness. By ridiculousness I mean scenes such as the one in which our morphing furry friend Lautner, earns a gold star in survival 101 by sharing a sleeping bag with Bella, while Edward curses his stone cold, blood dry self for not being up to the job of keeping his fiance warm from across the tent. Still, the passion and jealousy displayed by both vampire and wolf alike made for a satisfyingly entertaining, and impressively unpredictable, love triangle.

Another aspect that upped the films anti was a serious rating change so far as fight scenes were concerned. I’m not one for gore but give me a good battle any day of the week; the fact that vampires don’t bleed made the good vs. evil face-off thrilling without being cringe worthy. The most common mode of execution was torn off limbs that seemed to detach and crumble as though they were made of fiberglass. I dug it. Granted, I had to laugh into my popcorn a few times at the appearance of the humungous fluffy puppy kindergarden crew that was the wolf pack, but what solid film is absent of these moments of light hearted blockbuster mockery? Ultimately, these stifled snickers were balanced with moments of mouth agape focus when the good vampires joined forces with the wolves to protect Bella from the ‘non-vegetarian’ vampire army, aka, the ones who hunt humans instead of wildlife. No, the battle scenes weren’t greek epic comparable, but I wont say that I wasn’t pretty pumped (“Get him!” or “Yes!” definitely escaped under breath at least a few times).

So, there it is. Eclipse was sweet, I’d see it again. I’m considering catching up on the books and starting to build excitement for the fourth movie as far in advance as I began to build animosity towards the third. While I’m in the spirit of admitting to things, while ordering an iced green tea at Starbucks the morning after my induction into Twilight fan-hood, I saw the Eclipse CD for sale at the register; Stewart with that slightly distant, slightly depressed, look on her face standing between the set expressions of Pattinson and Lautner. Granted I didn’t know if Bella was deciding between Vampire and Werewolf or if the conflict was heroin chic runway vs. boy band commercial looks, nor did I care. Copped it. And yeah, I like that, too.

Spiky Subtleties make for Brilliance of "Hedgehog"

A 12 year old girl, a hotel concierge, and a mysterious Japanese widower, all with one thing in common: their extraordinary minds. The Elegance of the Hedgehog is the story of 54 year old concierge and self-described “toad”, Renee Michel, and the people whom she allows to discover the genius behind her front of deepest banality. 

A woman raised in utter poverty who received little special attention besides, Renee decided early on that her above average IQ and below average position on the social hierarchy could not exist harmoniously (at least not so long as both were acknowledged by the outside world). And so she created her own: the concierge of an upscale hotel in Paris, Renee has convinced her workplace’s wealthy inhabitants that she is dull by all accounts, capable of offering only the most generic responses (or muffled grunts) in response to the few attempts at conversation she must entertain. Her own living quarters, however, paint a different portrait. Full of books on German ideology, still life paintings (an especial obsession), and the Russian literature that she loves so much, Renee inhabits two spheres: one in which she plays the role that the disinterested masses assume she fulfills, and one enriching her hungry mind with mankind’s higher pursuits. A lonely existence to say the least. Until.. 

Enter: Paloma. A resident of one of the hotel’s higher floors, Paloma is fiercely intelligent, pitifully bored, and painfully distant from her well heeled parents and pseudo-philosopher elder sister. Twelve year old Paloma decides (as clear minded and calmly as though she were choosing between gel pen colors) to end her life, though not before burning down her apartment at a time when she’s sure no one will get hurt. In an effort to create something of substance during her last weeks on the planet, she begins two projects: a series of pensive entries called “Profound Thoughts”, and “Journal of the Moving World”, a more general commentary on the day to day mishmash that further drains her young soul of hope in the universe. Between her musings on the power of art to grant meaning, the symphonic perfection of correct grammar, and the disgust she experiences at the recounting of her mother’s overpriced visits to a vapid therapist, Paloma starts to wonder if there isn’t something a little different about the concierge. When a handsome and polite newcomer, Mr. Ozu, moves into the building, Paloma finds not only a new friend, but a fellow suspect of the brilliance that lies beneath the grunting woman who operates the elevator.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a story of such hope and rebirth that it could be mistaken for a romantic comedy were it not for author Muriel Barbery’s smart, thoughtful, and enlightening execution. The appeal of the story itself is rivaled only by the genuinely hilarious and truly provoking bits of thought, wisdom, and faith, that are bestowed by her characters. A book that could have easily lapsed into pretension manages to retain compassion and depth throughout. Despite its theme of a generally misinformed population, it seems everyone got it right placing this one on the Bestseller list. 

Beyond Mountains - Saving the World Pro Bono

“Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe.” This Haitian saying, literally, “God gives, but doesn’t share” encapsulates one of the world’s largest problems. The sharing is left in our hands, and humanity’s seeming lack of skill for distribution could be called the driving force behind Dr. Paul Farmer’s mission. The vast inequalities regarding the world’s wealth distribution leave Third World citizens powerless, both politically and as regards their own well being. Dr. Farmer’s mission is simple enough. That mission is to bring healthcare to the people of the world, and specifically, the people of the world who can’t afford it. While many may advocate this aim, Farmer himself has carved a place in medical and philanthropic history as a man who is dedicating his life to this lofty ambition’s pragmatic achievement. In the best selling book, Mountains Beyond Mountains, Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder delivers the thoroughly absorbing story of a man who dedicated his life to saving lives undervalued by society, while spreading the principle that all lives share equal worth. 

It was Farmer’s college mentor, German polymath Rudolf Virchow, who would introduce Farmer to many of the philosophies that became the foundation of his works. Virchow acknowledged that sickness equated to an individual life under unfavorable living conditions, therefore an epidemic signaled a mass disturbance. The cure? According to Virchow, “full and unlimited democracy”, a claim that Dr. Farmer took to heart. His pull to Haiti was natural and immediate. His admission to Harvard Medical School coincided with a fierce dedication to making medical progress in this abused region. Here was a doctor determined to provide the poor with services that their governments would not, and so the blueprint for Zanmi Lasante was born. Zanmi Lasante, Farmer’s masterpiece a citadel surrounded by one of the most impoverished villages on the face of the planet, Cange. Dr. Farmer arrived in Cange to hordes of desperate Haitians, pleading with him for care for their untreated tuberculosis, worsening cases of AIDS, and starving infants. He knew he’d found the place to set up shop. While maintaining some of the highest grades in his class at Harvard, Farmer began his project and soon found himself living a life of non-stop travel and tribulation, not that he would have it any other way. One day Kidder asked Farmer why he pushed himself to such extremes, and Farmer, making clear that he hoped the comment didn’t sound meglomaniacal, stated simply that if he wasn’t working, someone died. 

Paul Farmer Junior seems to possess more than the average person’s tolerance for unpleasant habituations, perhaps a tolerance that stemmed from his own unique circumstances in childhood. Living first in a house in Alabama, Paul Farmer Senior would soon relocate his young family to a trailer park in Florida where Paul, his parents, and two brothers and two sisters, would live in a huge blue bus they deemed The Blue Bird. Farmer would make first contact with people from Haiti, the nation he would later dedicate his life to, when his father made the family pick citrus fruit as a means of temporary income. The Farmers were the only white people amongst the Haitian workers. The stunt was short lived, but the experience was one more from his childhood which would instill principles of equality and sympathy for the poor. As a fourth grader, Farmer, dressed in a bathrobe that loosely resembled a lab jacket and with stick in hand serving as pointer would teach the family about various forms of reptilian life, jabbing at the incredibly accurate drawings he had created. 

His early understanding would bloom into the genius that found him placed in the elite Brigham Hospital Residency program in Boston, Massachusetts. It was at Brigham that Farmer would engage in Robin Hood antics, filling backpacks with medical drugs and transporting them to Haiti. Many mentors would shape the course of Farmer’s life, one of the most influential being Father Jack, a priest who provided Farmer with church housing for much of his time at medical school. Father Jack’s personal philosophy? “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.” Paul and his colleagues would put this quote to use tenfold in their Robin Hood antics during the program’s development stages. It was benefactor Tom White, a billionaire determined to do something of worth with his fortune, who made much of the construction in Haiti, ranging from schools to multiple medical centers, a reality. White would also eventually reimburse Brigham for the “borrowed” aid. It was Farmer’s unalterable focus on individual patients that set him apart from the promoters of mass health care. It was this specialized attention that inspired the title of Kidder’s book. “Mountains beyond mountains” is a Haitian saying which Tom used on one occasion when the two would hike for an entire day to reach Morne Michel, the farthest settlement in Zanme Lisante’s catchment area, to ask one patient why he hadn’t attended the follow up appointment for his tuberculosis treatment. As it turned out, there’d been date confusion. 

Paul’s mentor had taught him during his undergraduate studies that medicine and politics were intricately connected if not one in the same, “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.” Paul’s expulsion from Haiti amongst growing political unrest would only solidify this ideology. The services that he was providing had not gone unnoticed by the mayor of Port-au-Prince, a corrupt leader who would have many of Farmer’s dearest friends evading assassination attempts when he fire bombed their churches. Farmer would lose four friends during this period. One powerful friend, Aristide, would be elected to office, only to be deposed almost immediately when it became clear that his intentions were democratic. Farmer regained entry to Haiti near the time of Aristide’s reinstatement three years later, and soon thereafter, would witness one of the most grizzly cases he had ever seen. Poor Chouchou, a Haitian who supported Aristide, was fatally brutalized by The Junta, the Haitian soldier’s who enforced the mayor’s policies. Farmer would later take his journey to save the world to Peru and Russia, where while the governments were more compliant, the rampant cases of tuberculosis and AIDS still gave Farmer opportunity to have substantial effect. 

When parting from a trip to Cuba, Farmer and Kidder, now close companions, catch sight of an airplane hanger boasting the words “Partia es Humanidad”: The only nation is humanity. Tracy Kidder presents a detailed and impassioned account of one man’s belief in this idea. Paul Farmer Jr. didn’t consider himself an American, nor a “blan” as the people of Haiti initially called him, referring to his light skin. Just as a citizen of humanity, and a citizen who believes that while there are people in the world who can’t pay for his services, it would be “ambivalent” of him to charge for them. “I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent. Comma.” (Paul often ended sentences with the word comma, signifying the word asshole which was implied to follow). A life led in an extraordinarily successful evasion of ambivalence will hopefully inspire the rest of us to consider the fact that justice can’t prevail without personal sacrifice. Farmer and his dedicated team prove that it truly is a small group of people with a goal as vast as the planet who end up changing it. Hopefully Mountains Beyond Mountains will motivate the rest of us to avoid falling on the right side of that comma. 

Born Barefoot, Born to Run

Human beings often need boatloads of motivation to make it to the gym. We also like foods that come in plastic wrappers and beverages that taste way too good to contain zero calories and zero sugar. According to Christopher McDougall, human beings are also born to run. His exploration of an ancient culture in the depths of the Mexican canyons, and the crazy cast of characters he meets along the way, lead him to discover not only the secrets of breaking records from the Olympics to the way off road Leadville 100, but also more than he could have hoped about how to live a life.

The Tarahumara, a secluded and reclusive Mexican tribe, run in thong sandals that they create out of tire and leather strips. They rarely include meat in their diets (mostly because they can't afford it), and live miles away from any hospital. This means that they go unvaccinated, without access to regular checkups, common medicines, or simple treatments. The Tarahumara can also run 100 miles in record breaking time and finish with a smile on their face, run live game to death for the rare protein gorge, and make it up and down thousand-foot peaks in a third of the time it takes to make the journey by horse. Oh, they die from old age… but hardly anything else. As McDougall comes to know these age defying super humans, along with a medley of U.S. talents, he is enlightened as to how far current culture has taken us from our own natures.

Those $300 heel, ankle, and Achilles padded, solar activated, rain resistant, zero gravity running shoes we're investing in every three months? They're weakening our foot structures to the point where our degenerated bones are dependent on them to prevent injury, and they're causing a devastatingly high percentage of running injuries each year. Amazingly, our foot was actually made the way it is, because it works the way it is - without Nike's help. The foot's arch actually becomes higher by exercising it when you don't fill the space between the arch and the ground with rubber. In fact, barefoot pressure on the foot naturally raises your arch so much that one Olympic winner's foot shrank two shoe sizes. My own barefoot running test left muscles I didn't know I had sore for… well, they still are, a testimony to how little use they've been getting in my Asics. It also cut two minutes off of my usual 2-mile time. McDougall discovered that, in fact, human beings have evolved correctly in a lot more ways than current "fix it" society gives our species credit for.

The Tarahumara live an entirely natural lifestyle, free from aggression, mental health issues, and premature aging, without putting any focus on achieving these effects. That's right, some mountain air, barefoot running, community focus, and time spent away from pollution has granted this tribe what the rest of the western world spends billions on every year for plastic surgery, yoga, fancy running shoes, and gym memberships, and they could still be pin-up ads for Botox.

But "born to run"? Sure, we all know that exercise is a positive habit, but evolutionarily programmed? Compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, we're unforgivably slow and weak. We didn't even get camouflage, so we can't hide from the bigger, faster animals in the woods with their bigger, sharper claws and teeth. Yet when it comes to brawn, there is a place where humans distance themselves big time from the rest of the creatures on the planet. That's distance. The slow and steady cross-country crowd in high school was on to more than just how to obtain a nerdy label, something like Darwinism. We gather to run long distances, marathons, and double marathons. Hell, Forrest Gump gathered a cult willing to jog with him across the country. We're capable of keeping up a decent pace for hundreds of miles. Science tells us that homo erectus, the homo sapien's cousin who died out to clear the way for our rule, was stronger and smarter than us. So, what's up? Their bulk, coupled with their lack of an Achilles' tendon (a feature homo sapiens share with all of the fastest animals on the planet) left them unable to run as long and far as we can. This could have given us an advantage in an ability to outrun game. Most animals, while much faster than humans, can sustain such speed for a very short period of time. Keep chasing and they're lungs combust somewhere around the three to five hour mark. Granted, the theory has its holes. For instance, if the best distance runners are vegetarians, how was chasing meat our evolutionary edge? While the origins of the advantage remain elusive, the fact that our heads are positioned over our necks, that we have an Achilles' tendon, and that we lack the bulk of our primate ancestors makes our evolved running prowess undeniable.

Born to Run is not a book only for people interested in running ultra marathons. In fact, it's a book about the fundamental elements of being human, and the necessity of returning to them in order to be human as best we can. Whether you're interested in sprinting up twenty-six hundred foot peaks through the Rockies for the Leadville 100, or completing a lap around your block without requiring I.V. aid after the fact, Born to Run explores the principles that allow all of us to be impressive athletes in the animal kingdom, as well as how to maintain a healthy mind and body without mortgaging your house. In the words of Dr. Lieberman: "If there's any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it's to run." So get moving.

"Outliers": The Equation for Above and Beyond

The study of things that people desire is not a new one. It is the foundation of industry upon industry, from motivational speaking, to retreats, to the hundreds of thousands of books geared towards aiding people in acquiring what they want. We’re fascinated by successful people - they’re on our television screens walking down red carpets or entering intimidating buildings, they’re in our newspapers making headlines for their latest big moves. Their triumphs are rewarded with magazine spreads and flattering stories, their failures litter internet news sources and present to us mopey pictures of recently boisterous tycoons and stars. Authors, employees, and middle school students alike have always observed those who have things they wish to attain, be it Bill Gates’ boldness, Oprah’s perseverance, or Kim’s new roller blades. They’ve got something we want, and studying them to find out how they got it is human nature. Whether your aim is to be a rock star or a monk, your local bookstore will likely provide. There is one quality of all of these studies, however, that seems to be consistent. Success is studied as an individual achievement, earned due to the brains, brawn, or drive of the person experiencing its glories. This is where Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, diverges from its neighbors on the bookshelf. This deemed “Story of Success” focuses on factors of community, coincidence, and even adversity,as ingredients at least as vital as talent or intelligence in the accomplishment concoction. 

The first example that Gladwell provides is the Canadian Hockey League,the best junior league on the

planet. In a country that takes hockey very seriously, training begins early. Most kids are on the ice by the time they enter elementary school, and the talent divisions commence almost immediately. Reviewing the 2007 professional roster, it was Canadian psychologist, Roger Barnsley’s, wife Paula who noticed an odd synchronicity: an overwhelming majority of the boys were born within the first four months of the year. The study was expanded, the trend was undeniable. Statistics reveal that in all professional hockey players across the globe, forty percent are born between January and March, thirty percent between April and June, twenty percent between July and September, with only ten percent having been born between October and December. Do the planets aline in such a way as to give those born between January and April superior skating skills? Do embryos develop better musculature between June and December? Or are those born early in the year endowed with some kind of unconscious confidence boost because they got here first? In fact, the cut off for hockey registration is January 1st. This means that the players born earliest in the year are bigger, oftentimes sizably so at that age, and appear to be more talented players. They’re then placed in an elite group and given much more specialized attention and many more hours of practice.

 Sociologist Robert Merton calls it The “Matthew Effect” based on its grounding in the New Testament’s Gospel of Matthew: 

“For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

A small chance advantage can often garner a magnitude of specialized opportunities. 

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joy have two more things in common beyond abnormal intelligence and business savvy: they were all born between 1954 and 1956, and they were all provided with rare and vital opportunities for practice in their trade. Those born in 1955 were the perfect age for the dawning of the personal computer, old enough to think about the new machines in terms of their worth in business, and young enough to take part in the revolution as opposed to just feel its effects. Each of them took an early interest in computers, and then, no different from the hockey elite, chance and timing made all the difference. The mothers at Bill Gates’ private middle school decided the year that he started there to pay for a computer center. Most colleges at the time didn’t have computer centers. Steve Jobs lived in the center of Silicon Valley in an area full of engineers from Hewlett Packard, whose evening talks he was able to hear as often as he pleased, which was often. And Bill Joy? He attended University of Michigan to study biology and just happened to live in a dorm next to the computing center. A little creativity with the codes system granted him unlimited access and he would often stay there overnight. 

These stories of chance turned into huge success pertain to one of the major certainties that Malcolm Gladwell has determined through years of observation. To master something, anything, you must practice it for ten thousand hours. Some of the smartest people in the world with IQs pushing 200 (point of reference, Einstein’s IQ was 150), have completely floundered, failing to discover their calling or put it to work. Gladwell attributes this to the fact that IQ without chance opportunities that provide these 10,000 hours of practice, doesn’t add up to achievement. We all know that Mozart was a prodigy. He began composing his first pieces around age four, yet his earlier pieces weren’t considered especially inspired. Even the things he was coming up with in his teens were easily overlooked. It wasn’t until he was 21, after ten years of composing and the crossing of that ten thousand hour mark, that Mozart began creating pieces that earned him any recognition. 

Of his book, Gladwell states: “This is not a book about tall trees. It’s a book about forests..” in other words, “..no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone”. The individual is a constant source of interest and study, and yet so much of what an individual does in life is dictated by those opportunities they’re provided with and the time they dedicate to their passions. Gladwell believes that intelligence, talent, looks, and any number of strictly individual characteristics, effect the ease with which someone is able to accomplish various tasks. But ultimately, it is the right time, the right place, and ten thousand hours of practice, that creates super stars.