picture in my mind

"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. "In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn't address why some people get more out of practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

~ Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, The 10,000-Hour Rule

What have you done for at least 10, 000 hours? Haha.

To get a sense of how absurd the selection process at elite Ivy League schools has become, consider the following statistics. In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University. Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class. How many did Harvard accept? About 1,600, which is to say they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants. Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn't, when both have identical - and perfect - academic records? Of course not. Harvard is being dishonest. Shwartz is right. They should just have a lottery.

~ Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, The Trouble With Geniuses, Part 1

No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich. ~ Chinese saying, quoted in Outliers: The Story of Success, Rice Paddies and Math Tests

The world is your oyster? You shape your destiny? Well -- to an extent. The rest is God's will; whether you ended up in the right family, the right country, the right human race, the right school, or the right environment. It's all a wonderful combination of perfect circumstances mostly out of your control, much like the creation of the universe, that results in a desired outcome.