I’m a greedy reader during summer vacation. I’m looking for education, guidance, or entertainment. If I start a book and I don’t feel like it’s offering one of those three things, I ditch it. I’m a slow reader, and I get bored easily. If the prose isn’t popping, the ideas aren’t flowing, the plot is meandering, you’re headed to the trash (sorry, Thomas Hardy!).
Of the four books I read this summer, I’m pleased to write that one provided me with ideas I would classify as life-changing.
This book was not Moby-Dick, which I started it at the beginning of June as part of a book club that was made up of fellow English teachers seeking to patch up gaps in their reading. When I purchased my copy, the old clerk at the bookstore launched into an account of his experience reading it in high school. In fact, throughout the summer the sight of my book — a Penguin edition with a gold and black drawing on the cover of a whale’s tail slamming into the ocean — would provoke similar sentiments from many of my more aged relatives and acquaintances. Clearly there was a time when Moby-Dick was a staple of high school English, the same way climbing a two-story rope was a staple of phys-ed. But both the English classroom and the gym have evolved: students are no longer asked to arbitrarily climb to the roof of the gym, and if you polled most English teachers you’d find only a small percentage attempt to teach it in high school. Besides the issues of length (my copy of Moby clocked in at over 600 pages) the cultural relevance of the book has not aged as well as other American classics like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye or Gatsby. (In some contemporary circles, Melville’s portrayal of Ahab’s monomania would probably be celebrated for the character’s grittiness and “stick-to-it-ness”.) I’m not going to argue that more teachers should be assigning Melville’s novel, but I do think part of the value in reading it as a student comes from the achievement of actually completing the task, which builds confidence in your abilities — and makes you recount stories of your achievement years later. It’s an old-school sort of intellectual hazing that has been phased out of public school pedagogy, for the better…probably.
That said, I enjoyed it a lot. For such an austere work, I was surprised by the amount of humor and warmth it offered, especially at the beginning. The famous digressive chapters were perfectly palatable for me in their compact chapters. The now-archaic whaling industry made for fascinating investigation, the amount of work and suffering that went into acquiring oil for our lamps. And when Melville did deign to add some plot to his novel, it felt all the more vivid and compelling. The chapter where the crew finally goes after a whale (about a third of the way through the novel) was more action-packed and vivid than any passage from Blood Meridian, our book club selection from last summer. I doubt I’ll ever teach Moby-Dick to a class of high schoolers, but I will certainly recommend it with confidence to any student seeking a transformative reading experience.
I’ll be a bit more hesitant to push a copy of Miles into anyone’s hands. There’s plenty to recommend about the famous jazz trumpeter’s autobiography — story after story of his integral role in shaping bebop, cool jazz, modal, and fushion — but the self-aggrandizing becomes numbing after a while. Miles has very little use for humility. And for good reason: his confidence was a key feature in his success. His confidence led him to drop out of Julliard, to quit Charlie Parker’s combo, to surround himself in the early 60s with an intimidating quintet of young prodigies. Along with his confidence, the book helped reveal the importance of Miles’s privileged background. A rich dentist father in St. Louis afforded Miles many advantages over his peers, but most notably it gave Miles an opportunity to kick his heroin addiction in the fifties. Without his father’s financial and emotional support, it’s very likely he would have ended up another casualty of the drug epidemic, leaving someone else to shape the direction of jazz.
Major League Baseball, like Miles Davis, enjoyed a golden age of popularity in the mid-twentieth century and has since receded in the public consciousness. Unlike Miles Davis, baseball isn’t dead. In fact, each season the national pastime is becoming more innovative in its application of statistics. Where the sport once was dictated by which franchise could buy the best players, it now has become more about what teams can maximize the talent of the players already on their roster. It sounds simple enough, but goes against an old adage of the sport, that you can’t turn a mule into a race horse. These days, the most successful clubs are doing just that. Their methods are detailed in The MVP Machine, by Ben Lindberg and Travis Sawchick. Released this spring, the book uses pitcher Trevor Bauer (recently traded to the Cincinnati Reds) as the face of these principles. Self described as physically average, Bauer has succeeded in professional baseball (he put up a Cy Young-caliber campaign last year) because of his fanatical devotion to maximizing every physical advantage he possesses. His unorthodox training involves throwing at max effort, a stretch routine using equipment from track and field, and using Edgertronic cameras to develop pitches over the offseason. Many of these techniques that were once viewed as a novelty have slowly become the norm across the majors. Thanks to the wealth of data collected by the radar-powered Statcast, teams are able to focus on the most granular details of a player’s swing or pitch. For some players, tweaking a grip or batting stance or the amount that you throw a certain pitch can be the difference between a career in AAA or earning tens of millions of dollars, as with Justin Turner and Rich Hill, two players on the Dodgers who recount their part in this revolution of player development.
As a listener of Lindberg’s podcast, I knew this book was written in a hurry, seeking to document what is becoming an increasingly well known phenomenon. The book’s prose quality might not be up to the level of a Michael Lewis work, but very few nonfiction books are, and the interviews with behind-the-scenes figures make up for some of the workmanlike prose. The lionization of Trevor Bauer in the book has been criticized in the wake of Bauer’s base Twitter behavior. Maybe the book could have mentioned what an unpleasant person he is…I didn’t take issue with his inclusion, considering how applicable he was to the topic. He is problematic if, as I suspect, the book seeks to pivot to a larger market than baseball stat nerds. If the hope is for the book to become a Moneyball-level hit, they should have picked someone with a little more earthiness than Bauer. The guy is not Billy Beane, an all-American jock full of ingratiating quirks. The authors attempt to humanize Bauer through his drone hobby. Despite this, as a fan of baseball, baseball stats, and self-improvement, I felt very much in the target demo of this book. When I finished it I mailed my copy to a fellow baseball fan currently living in Alabama, and I ordered a book that was constantly mentioned throughout The MVP Machine.
That book was Peak, and it was the best book I read all summer, a book that I have since been pressing on others with evangelical fervor.
Subtitled Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, the book has the aesthetics of another Outlier rip-off: a white background, plain text, a small visual metaphor (a red flag planted at the summit of the “A”, denoting the peak of performance, I guess). One of the first key differences between this book and Outliers is the purpose of the author. Or authors, I should say: Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool are both academics, and the findings described in Peak are largely based on Ericsson’s own research. (I don’t have any problem with Malcolm Gladwell as a journalist, nor do I begrudge him the cushy career he’s made out of recounting the innovations of others. But it certainly adds to the authority of an author when he or she is the one who has done the research.) The other key difference is the way the books approach success: where Outliers offers anecdotes and vague precepts about achievement, Peak is able to confidently present peer-reviewed findings into why some people are better than others at tasks.
It starts and ends with practice. Improvement in a measurable activity (like athletics, or chess, or playing an instrument) comes with practice — that is, the right type of practice. As explained in the introduction, “The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.” What is the right sort of practice? The authors describe a form of practice called deliberate practice, which involves pushing yourself past your comfort level, breaking your body or mind’s homeostasis so you can adapt and, ultimately, improve.
The book takes aim at the concept that people are born innately talented. It’s a very common concept — some are born better at math, some of us are naturally smarter than others at English. The book contends that most of us are capable of great things — it’s just a matter of how much you’re willing to work for it: “The reason most people don’t possess extraordinary physical capabilities (running sub five minute miles, ten miles in an hour) isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for it, but because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of ‘good enough.’”
Unlike most books on the topic, Peak doesn’t offer any tricks or shortcuts or secret “gritty” traits that help make people successful. In fact, the authors call out Duckworth and Gladwell by name in sections, picking apart the shoddy science in their work. No one is born with a “gritty” gene. Some of us are born in a more supportive environment that offers the best opportunities for improvement. Ten thousand hours doesn’t make someone an expert at anything, unless they are practicing at 100% effort, ideally with the consultation of a teacher.
Later in the book the authors outline the basic tenets of deliberate practice: “Does it push people to get outside their comfort zones and attempt to do things that are not easy for them? Does it offer feedback on the performance and on what can be done to improve it? Have those who developed the approach identified the best performers in that particular area and determined what set apart from everyone else? Is the practice designed to develop the particular skills that experts in the field possess?”
The more I read the more I considered its application in my own life, especially in the classroom. How can I use these principles of deliberate practice to get the most out of my students? I have some ideas. The chapter on education I found interesting but not especially applicable to a public school classroom, where the students aren’t always as invested in success as college students.
It’s not a long book, barely 250 pages. It took me several weeks to read, as I was constantly underlining and rereading passages. I found it inspiring in the way it presents achievement as attainable for anyone. Too often I encounter students who have pigeon-holed their abilities before they even reached adulthood. This book doesn’t make excuses for anyone, but it does offer a path for improvement.
As this summer break draws to a close, I look forward to the next ten months, where my reading diet will be largely composed of student papers. Hopefully some of the knowledge I gained from my reading these past two months can be used to help their growth.