How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
by Paul Tough

Unless your definition of children includes college students, the second word of the title is a misnomer. This book is about how young people, from infants to college students succeed. Perhaps a bit more subtly and more accurately, Tough's book describes how adults in various organizations, from NGOs to schools organize teaching and mentorship to assist young people to develop the traits that may allow them to succeed in today's society. The book describes approaches to developing character in young people so that they can succeed against the odds stacked against them. It describes mentoring of young mothers to help them raise children who can succeed against a backdrop of poverty. It describes a middle school chess team from Brooklyn that succeeds in national competition against teams from much higher socio-economic schools. Tough describes several schools that have been built from the ground up to instill 'character' in the students with the idea that the schools don't necessarily select a priori for kids who will be successful. Rather most of the schools are set in impoverished areas. One school was rather rich; there the problem was kids from families so rich, the kids were overprotected and never learned how to pick up the pieces after a failure. This part of the book harkens somewhat to Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath.

This book is something you want to read if you have a baby in the house. Spoiler alert: the answer is to hug and hold your baby. None of letting your kid cry himself out in the crib so he learns how to comfort himself. Pick him up and hold him. My explanation: then the kid doesn't learn how to cry. They learn to comfort themselves by always being comfortable. Don't let the kid practice being out of control. Let your kid practice always being in control; that's how you raise a kid who can handle herself when she grows up. 

But this book has also affected how I advise grad students. The problem for rich kids is overprotection. So rather than tell my grad students everything, it's important to let them figure things out for themselves. 

The book isn't perfect. But I'm glad its not perfect. If it were perfect, it would be too late; everyone would know this stuff, and we wouldn't need to learn this stuff. 

I highly recommend How Children Succeed to everyone. If this doesn't affect how you deal with other people, then you're not in a situation where you deal with other people ever. If you're that lone hermit, fine, don't read this. But everyone else should read this book today. 

The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle
by Steven Pressfield

Pressfield is the author of several bestsellers. The War of Art is a 12 step self-help support group for procrastinators, a biological and psychological disection of procrastination and your own personal writer's side-kick in the war against procrastination all in one short text. Pressfield calls the cause of procrastination resistance. Resistance is the voice inside your head, the one that tells you you'll never make it, you're going to fail. Resistance tells you that you NEED to watch the next episode in your TV show, NOW; that going shopping IMMEDIATELY is more important than sitting down to write your dissertation. Pressfield takes resistance apart, explains it in clear language and explains how to overcome it. The book is a quick read. Reading War of Art won't satisfy resistance and as soon as you read the book, resistance is going to kick into high gear with long discussions of why it's important to, well, do whatever it is except get up and do what needs doing, powdermilk. 

Resistance is that thing that makes us read tons of Andy Gelman blog posts instead of working on our next paper. Blogging could arguably also be a form of resistance. I prefer to think blog-keeping is my way of staying sane and cataloging a few of my semi-great thoughts for my future students to hear. Are you listening, future students? Hear hear! And more importantly, blogging is my way of practicing writing on a frequent enough basis to grease the mental writing wheels. 

The War of Art title harkens back to The Art of War by Sun Tzu, available for free on most fine digital reading platforms in multiple versions. I've yet to make it even partway through Sun Tzu's book, but I made it through Pressfield's book in a few bus trips in to work. 

Resistance is feudal. [I've always wanted to write that.] It holds you in fief, and demands you do anything but what is important. 

I'll keep this review short. Be done with your blog reading. NOW. STOP READING THIS BLOG! Go do something you aspire to. If something is holding you back, that something is resistance. Read The War of Art and get yourself on track. 

The sub-title is Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. I think D&G (David and Goliath, not Dolce 'n' Garbanzo) doesn't quite match Gladwell's quartet of grand slams of Outliers, Blink, The Tipping Point and What the Dog Saw. Blink and David and Goliath are going to have something in common: Gladwell is going to be disappointed, either in his readers, or in his writing because people are going to come away with the wrong message. In Blink, Gladwell thought his message was that we are very likely to draw the wrong conclusions in the first few seconds, when we're judging people/things/situations. And I think he was disappointed or surprised (this is from me remembering Gladwell's comments at UCLA a year ago, Oct 24, 2012 in the IMED seminar series), that many peoples' takeaway from Blink was that we judge really well in the first few seconds, in that first blink of an eye. Now, partly, this may be a 6 of one, glass half full in the other situation. Blink I thought made the case initially that we can judge some situations very well very quickly, and that additional time doesn't help the judgment. Then Gladwell went over a number of situations where people made terrible errors in those first few seconds. David and Goliath has a similar two (or maybe more?) part theme. He makes the case that David, playing by David's rules in the David and Goliath encounter, actually had a very serious advantage over Goliath. Now had David fought according to Goliath's rules, Goliath would have had a substantial advantage.  As we know, David had his choice of rules under which to operate and won, fairly easily. Those of us without David's skills or imagination would have fought essentially on Goliath's terms, and we would have lost. Perhaps this was rock paper scissors (a point Gladwell makes in the book), but not a version of the game where both sides show their choices simultaneously; Goliath was chosen first; only then David volunteered. 

In other parts of the book Gladwell makes a case that people with what are considered substantial cognitive deficits are or can be extremely successful in our society. For example, a ridiculous number of presidents spent much of childhood without two parents, including two of our recent greater presidents, Clinton and Obama. He gives examples of people who learned to read late, or almost not at all, or that huge numbers of entrepreneurs have dyslexia. Two of our other recent presidents, Bush the Herbert Walker and Bush the just Walker have been identified as possibly/probably being dyslexic. Neil Bush, George W.'s brother and HW's son was actually diagnosed as dyslexic. As dyslexia tends to run in families, this might be considered evidence about W and HW. George W. has denied being dyslexic.  

Periodically in the book, Gladwell reminds us, "that there are a remarkable number of dyslexics in prison" or that every dyslexic that Gladwell asked has said absolutely that they wouldn't wish dyslexia on their own children. But over all the book seems to stress the advantage of being the underdog, or challenged, and the limits of power. An important point is that often we don't judge situations correctly: competitors may not be as disadvantaged or unequal as we think. Someone can be lucky. The rich may ruin their children by spoiling them. Someone may not play by the rules. But, often we do judge the situation correctly, the superior force overwhelms the inferior force, rich people produced children who in turn do extremely well. Poor people who receive lousy educations end up working dead end, low paying jobs or in jail. 

Another popular bestseller, The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, makes a related point, that we often mis-under-estimate very small or very large probabilities. Taleb has made a specialty of identifying these situations and betting in the stock market to take advantage of situations where traders are underestimating the chance of a disaster.  When the disaster happens, Taleb makes a fortune. But he loses a little bit on normal days. The fortunes overwhelm the normal small losses.  Supposedly. 

I highly recommend Gladwell's first four books. If after reading those, you are game for more, by all means read D&G. It's still Gladwell, and the writing is still vintage Gladwell. But be prepared to have to process the information, and come to a more nuanced conclusion that the obvious but incorrect conclusion. 

This topic deserves further discussion, I'll follow-up in a further blog post.