Checkpoint 1

WOW! This book has had the greatest impact on my life of anything I have ever read and has changed how I now perceive success. I learned throughout the book that success is never a direct result of your hard work. People have either helped you out or uncontrollable factors such as your birth date or your ethnicity have fallen into place. For example, based on one's birthday, you can tell whether or not they have a chance of playing professional hockey. If they are born after the month of May, they have no shot. The reason for this pattern is that the cutoff for the age group is January 1st. People think that if somebody is born in July they will eventually catch up to the person born in February. But there is little truth to that at all. They never catch up which is what people do not understand. The same thing goes for education. You often see the oldest students scoring higher on exams than the younger students. Once again, the difference is never made up. I think it is important for people to understand this reality because once we are aware of the problem, we can try and find a solution. Such as splitting the class in half based on birthday. This way, a school would be able to produce twice as many smart kids as they did before because they could accommodate to the needs of each group.

After reading this book I felt that I had a personal enlightenment. It got my very interested in the topic of this study and related very closely to my AP Psychology course and a class I took in 9th grade called AP Human Geography. A major point of discussion in the book was about Lewis Terman and his "Termites". His "Termites" were supposed to be the smartest kids in the state of California and the future leaders of America based on their IQ scores. However, while some of the children went on to be very successful. Some never got anywhere in their lives. After discovering this and then studying previous Nobel Prize winners in their alma mater, Terman concluded that in order to be successful in your life you don't have to be the smartest person, you just have to smart enough to get into college. This goes against common beliefs that you have to get into Harvard in order to make a lot of money and be happy. Overall, this book was life changing to me and gave me a lot of insight on how certain people have become successful, and what it takes to be a successful person. I believe everybody should read this and I feel it will have the same impact on others that also choose to read it.

Checkpoint 2

Another thing that I took out of this book was that although some people become successful because of a rare set of circumstances that are purely luck, other people can achieve success by a seemingly simple formula. When you look at people like Michael Jordan, Beethoven, and Bill Gates they all share a common characteristic. They have practiced their trade for 10,000 hours. This is called the 10,000 hour rule. In theory this concept is simple and is almost guaranteed to work yet almost nobody is passionate about what they do or willing to dedicate their lives to something like these individuals did.

In addition to the 10,000 hour rule, something else that I took out of this book was the idea that you do not have to go to Harvard or Princeton in order to be a Nobel Prize winner or to be extremely successful. By analyzing some of the most successful people around the world, one notices that some are college dropouts and others have gone to some very pedestrian schools such as Gettysburg. While Gettysburg is a good school, it does not have the same reputation or prestige as Harvard, yet it still has produced a Nobel Prize winner. One does not have to be the smartest person out there in order to be successful, one just has to be smart enough to get into college and things will fall into place with enough dedication and desire to achieve one's goals.