A Patient Named Lachlan

Lachlan was in the hospital this week for a "small" procedure to repair a hernia in his stomach wall. They gave him a special hospital gown and trousers with orange tigers all over them. Lachlan was very brave.

The operation took longer than anyone expected, even the doctor. After the procedure Lachlan took a nap in the recovery room.

That night Lachlan slept in his own bed. He hugged his new stuffed Nemo. He didn't wake up all night.

The next day Lachlan was swollen but smiling. He played with Nemo and James, his new red train. He called his sisters with Skype and Facetime.

The day after that he danced and laughed and ran laps around the apartment.

Black Jack

The doctor tells us that grandkid #21 is a boy! One of each, the all American family! Now to come up with a name... It needs to be strong and original. Something with meaning. We can't use Jack or Monty, already assigned those to the cats. I know, I remember long ago... I had come up with the best name for a cat! Doug. Hmmm, this isn't going so well... this name thing is hard! Well, we'll come up with something but I wanted everyone to know that we're doing our best to even out the boy/girl ratio. Love you all,

Allan, Kathleen & Avangeline

Practice Makes Perfect

I've been reading the book "Talent Is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, which aims to debunk the myth that the world's top performers - whether in sports or business or chess - possess some type of innate ability that the rest of us don't.

Some interesting points:

Mozart, I've always heard, was reputed to be able to compose symphonies in his head. Not so, says Colvin. That belief can be traced back to a letter that was later proven to be a forgery. The truth: Mozart's manuscripts are as marked up with revisions as Beethoven or any other composer. Further, Mozart's early works were simply rearranged compositions of other composers, of little note, and he didn't compose anything exceptional until his 9th symphony, at the age of 21. That's 18 years after he began his rigorous training.

Apparently Mozart starting learning at a young age from his father, who was also a composer. The presence of a driven, skilled parent is a common story for those with "innate talent" regardless of the profession. Tiger Woods in golf, Andy Roddick in tennis, and Warren Buffett in investing each had one, and began their training at an exceptionally young age.

The point Colvin makes is that disciplined practice is what distinguishes top performers from the rest, not innate skills. The early start of Tiger and Roddick meant they had practiced more hours than anyone else in their age group, and that gave them an edge. And by practice, Colvin emphasizes long periods of specific skill-improving repetition, not just "hitting the ball around" or "jamming". Coaching is almost always required, even when they are at the top. Malcolm Gladwell makes similar points in "Outliers."

Colvin also spent a great deal of time talking about memory and how exceptional memory is learned, not innate, and generally specific to a single area of expertise. Example: chess experts can memorize where the pieces are on a board much faster than non-experts, but only when its a real game. If the pieces are placed randomly, experts tested the same as nonexperts.

While I haven't finished the book, his punchline seems to be that there is no replacement for experience, in particular the type of self-improving experience that is hard work and few people want to do.

What does that experience give top performers? Colvin mentions a few things:

1. They develop ways to access more information in a shorter amount of time than average, and gain an edge that way. Conversely, they develop the judgment required to read situations with less information and fill in the blanks.

2. They also develop intricate mental models of how their domain works, and use them to predict likely outcomes of any given action, filter important information from the noise, and know which buttons to push on whatever machine they are operating, and when to push them. It's interesting to note that Johnson O'Connor had a "structural visualization" aptitude test that sounds similar, but again Colvin asserts this is not innate, its something people learn to do.

3. Another common trait is they have a highly tuned process for achieving excellence. Before Chris Rock does his stand-up act for 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden, he has refined his material over a large number of sessions in front of small forums. He refines what works and drops what doesn't work.

It is, in the end, a book about succeeding in business. Colvin draws many parallels between business managment and the more visible sports and entertainment examples. He rebukes the theory, born of MBA programs and consulting groups like McKinsey, that great general managers could be plopped into any business situation, apply a set of standard rules, and be successful. Not so. More and more companies are looking for managers with deep domain expertise, because it is the foundation of sound judgment and good decisions. Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric since 2001, points to their aircraft division as a place where long tenure of management has resulted in 4-5 key decisions that won them 50 years of industry leadership. By contrast, in their reinsurance business, where they've churned people, he says they've basically failed.

A final note: Colvin doesn't think intelligence, measured by IQ or any other measure, is necessarily an advantage. Why is that? Because smart people often decide, for whatever reason, they don't want to do the work.

This is an 8" floppy that would hold 128k bytes. Dad used a lot of these in the early days...

It was on this day in 1975 that the Homebrew Computer Club first met. It turned out to be an enormously influential hobby club: its existence made possible the personal computer. At the time, computers were not for personal use or owned by individuals. For one thing, they were gigantic in size-- a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to their own personal computers. But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun, to use at home. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit-boards and information and share enthusiasm. The first of its kind, the Homebrew Computer Club first met 36 years ago today — in somebody's home garage in the Silicon Valley.

Among the early members: high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who designed the Apple I and II to bring down to the club to show it off, as well as Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne, who would later create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1. Other legendary figures in the computer world, including Bob Marsh, George Morrow, Jerry Lawson, and John Draper, were Homebrew members.

Less than five years later Dad bought his first computer. It was shortly after we moved to Gilford in 1979. It was then that he started consulting for Alphatype. That first computer cost $30,000. And, as they say, the rest is history.

Ski Utah

Elliot and Emmaline take a break from skiing the 4 ft of new 5% water density powder. It's just waiting for you!

New Englanders

Monique helped me track down Grammie Kimball's family, the Harrimans. Seems they're from England and our first Harriman ancestor born in the US was Jonathan Harriman born on Dec 5, 1657 in Rowley/Georgetown, Mass. Subsequent Harrimans stayed close to home in Haverhill, Bradford and Groveland.

One thing that's interesting about this is that all four Grandparent family lines (Tidd, Prescott, Kimball and Harriman) came to Massachusetts by the mid 1600s from England and stayed in Massachusetts for the next 350 years - mostly the Haverhill/Georgetown area.

As a reference, Plymouth Colony was founded in 1620.