On the way up to the On the Mat tournament in PA, I got to listen to an audio copy of the bestselling book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book makes a strong argument for the role of environment and circumstances in the development of successful individuals (“outliers”).
Read this Book!
The book begins with an analysis of childhood sports and finds that each level of competition, there is a disproportionate percentage of children that were born right after the age eligibility cutoff date. In other words, if the cutoff date for PeeWee little league is Dec 31, most of the players in the Big Kids little league were born in January. Why is this such a big deal?
Basically, a child born right after the cutoff date has more time to grow and develop than his peers that were born later. The extra physical development gives these kids the edge to perform better in the sport than their later-born peers. Especially in the younger years, this extra year plays a HUGE part.
More often than not, these kids are given more playing time and extra coaching because coaches, despite their best intentions, will often gravitate toward their “best” athletes. The parents, seeing that their children have some “talent”, will then push the child in that area, giving the child even more training. Over time, this extra practice adds up and provides an almost-insurmountable advantage to the earlier-born athlete. All this just because the child was ONE YEAR OLDER than the other children.
One of the great aspects of children’s martial arts training is that it largely gets rid of these circumstantial advantages and therefore allows each child to develop at their own pace. Firstly, competitions are based on weight. Unlike football, which favors bigger children, or basketball, which favors the taller ones, grappling competitions will pair children up with other children who are approximately the same size. This is great because it allows each child’s skill to come into play rather than just size. Especially for smaller children this is important because they can play an important role on the team; for example, in grappling sports, the 112 lb’er is just as important as the 200 lb’er and both are treated well because of that fact.
Unlike traditional team sports, kids in martial arts do not have to grow up so fast!
Secondly, each child receives an individual belt and competes with other children of that same belt. One of the toughest aspects of sports is the lack of development opportunities for individuals that start late. One of the BJJ Purple Belts at my school, Malcolm, loves telling the story of his first year of wrestling, when he was forced to wrestle varsity at 103 lbs and spent the rest of the season getting pinned – its no wonder that he did not go back for year two. This would not happen in Kids Brazilian Jiu Jitsu competitions because the art allows for there to 5 year old white belts as well as 20 year old ones (although the upper belt limit is different for each age). This helps early bloomers and late bloomers get enough time to develop before getting thrown to the wolves.
I am going to finish reading this book and talk a little bit more about in the blog. I am very interested in the 10,000 hour phenomenon (something I heard about about 2 years ago in Scientific American).
