Rohan Grant

Founder MAVERIC Athletics;
Creator MAVERIC Philosophy; WC-Rustin HS Sprint Coach;
committed to the pursuit of science/data/best practices in athletics

[divyansh tiwari @DivyanshT91162]

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT.

He knows his time is running out.

So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour.

He died 5 months later.

This is that lecture.

The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇
Bookmark it for later

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

In the 1920s, a Stanford psychologist tracked genius children for 50 years.

Malcolm Gladwell breaks down what he discovered:

Rich families → successful. Poor families → failures.

Not average. Failures. Genius-level IQs that produced nothing.

He spent 60 minutes at Microsoft explaining why we're wrong about success:

The psychologist was named Terman. He gave IQ tests to 250,000 California schoolchildren.

He identified the top 0.1%. Kids with IQs of 140 and above.

His hypothesis: these children would become the leaders of academia, industry, and politics.

He tracked them. And tracked them. For decades.

The results split into three groups.

The top 15% achieved real prominence. The middle group had average, moderately successful professional lives.

And the bottom group? By any measure, failures.

The difference wasn't personality. Wasn't habits. Wasn't work ethic.

It was simple: the successful geniuses came from wealthy households. The failures came from poor families.

Poverty is such a powerful constraint that it can reduce a one-in-a-billion brain to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity.

There's a concept called "capitalization rate."

It asks a simple question: what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing?

In inner city Memphis, only 1 in 6 kids with athletic scholarships actually go to college.

If our capitalization rate for sports in the inner city is 16%, imagine how low it must be for everything else.

Here's something stranger.

Gladwell read the birth dates of the 2007 Czech Junior Hockey Team:

January 3rd. January 3rd. January 12th. February 8th. February 10th. February 17th. February 20th. February 24th. March 5th. March 10th. March 26th...

11 of the 20 players were born in January, February, or March.

This isn't unique to the Czechs. Every elite hockey team in the world shows the same pattern. Every elite soccer team too.

Why?

The eligibility cutoff for youth leagues is January 1st.

When you're 10 years old, a kid born in January has 10 months of maturity on a kid born in October. That's 3 or 4 inches of height. The difference between clumsy and coordinated.

So we look at a group of 10 year olds, pick the "best" ones, give them special coaching, extra practice, more games.

We think we're identifying talent. We're just identifying the oldest.

Then we give the oldest more opportunities, and 10 years later they really are the best.

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

The capitalization rate for hockey talent born in the second half of the year? Close to zero.

We're leaving half of all potential hockey players on the table because of an arbitrary date on a calendar.

Kids born in the youngest cohort of their school class are 11% less likely to go to college.

11% of human potential squandered because we organize elementary school without reference to biological maturity.

Now here's the part about math.

Asian kids dramatically outperform Western kids in mathematics. The gap is enormous and consistent across decades of testing.

Some people say it's genetic. It's not.

It's attitudinal.

When Asian kids face a math problem, they believe effort will solve it.

When Western kids face a math problem, they believe the answer depends on innate ability they either have or don't.

Here's the proof.

The international math tests include a 120-question survey. It asks about study habits, parental support, attitudes.

It's so long most kids don't finish it.

A researcher named Erling Boe decided to rank countries by what percentage of survey questions their kids completed.

Then he compared it to the ranking of countries by math performance.

The correlation was 0.98.

In the history of social science, there has never been a correlation that high.

If you want to know how good a country is at math, you don't need to ask any math questions. Just make kids sit down and focus on a task for an extended period of time.

If they can do it, they're good at math.

Why do Asian cultures have this attitude?

Gladwell's theory: rice farming.

His European ancestors in medieval England worked about 1,000 hours a year. Dawn to noon, five days a week. Winters off. Lots of holidays.

A peasant in South China or Japan in the same period worked 3,000 hours a year.

Rice farming isn't just harder than wheat farming. It's a completely different relationship with work.

There's a Chinese proverb: "A man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry."

His English ancestors would have said: "A man who works 175 days a year, dawn to 11, may or may not be hungry."

If your culture does that for a thousand years, it becomes part of your makeup.

When your kids sit down to face a calculus problem, that legacy of persistence translates perfectly.

Now consider distance running.

In Kenya, there are roughly a million schoolboys between 10 and 17 running 10 to 12 miles a day.

In the United States, that number is probably 5,000.

Our capitalization rate for distance running is less than 1%.

Kenya's is probably 95%.

The difference isn't genetic. The difference is what the culture values and where it spends its attention.

Here's the most fascinating finding.

30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed with a profound learning disability.

Richard Branson is dyslexic. Charles Schwab is dyslexic. John Chambers can barely read his own email.

This isn't coincidence. Their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.

How do you succeed if you can't read or write from early childhood?

You learn to delegate. You become a great oral communicator. You become a problem solver because your entire life is one big problem. You learn to lead.

80% of dyslexic entrepreneurs were captain of a high school sports team. Versus 30% of non-dyslexic entrepreneurs.

By the time they enter the real world, they've spent their whole life practicing the four skills at the core of entrepreneurial success: delegation, oral communication, problem solving, and leadership.

Ask them what role dyslexia played in their success and they don't say it was an obstacle.

They say it's the reason they succeeded.

A disadvantage that became an advantage.

Here's what Gladwell wants you to understand:

When we see differences in success, our default explanation is differences in ability.

We forget how much poverty, stupidity, and attitude constrain what people can become.

We refuse to admit that our own arbitrary rules are leaving talent on the table.

We cling to naive beliefs that our meritocracies are fair.

The capitalization argument is liberating.

It says you don't look at a struggling group and conclude they're incapable. It says problems that look genetic or innate are often just failures of exploitation.

It says we can make a profound difference in how well people turn out.

If we choose to pay attention.

This 60 minute Microsoft talk will teach you more about success than every self-help book you've ever read combined.

Bookmark this & give it an hour today, no matter what.

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@RaesTake 0000plp

[David Perell @david_perell]

Have a friend who’s an expert in the science of learning. Once, we got to talking about math. He said the lowest hanging fruit is to send every kid back to the stage of math they’re not 100% fluent in.

For most kids, that’s something like 3rd or 4th grade. Then they should work their way up, step-by-step, and only graduate to the next level once they have mastery of the level before. And now with learning apps, they can speed-run the catch-up process.

The research is clear. It’s the social stigma of going back that holds kids back. Kids don’t want to be made-fun of, and no parent of an 8th grader wants to send their kids back to 3rd grade math, no matter how effective it may be.

We know how to fix the problem. We’re just afraid of the social repercussions. Many things work like this.

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@Michael4nderson @Ea1785 @Vmals @WCEaglesFH @ExplosionHoops @WChesterTrack @gina_buggy @GthingBBall @katie1armstrong @Pogmothoinpub @nata_omar @WCLadyPanthers @gardler21 summa cum laude!!! Fantastic accomplishment Kathleen!!

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@EACoachDavis What are the factors that you believe are contributing to this phenomenon at your school?

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@EACoachDavis Those times will be even faster over the next 2 weeks, as we get closer to the deadline.

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

Has the NIL structure numbered the days of amateur sports? What will the outcome be for sports that are considered no revenue? Will the Olympic sponsored sports entities pivot in order to become attractive entities for investment capital? https://t.co/Tm5ROwZMGl

[Joe Pompliano @JoePompliano]

Former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry says he is actively trying to buy college football and basketball teams.

Lasry says certain colleges could sell a 51% stake in their teams at a $500M to $750M valuation and then use that money for NIL and facility upgrades.

Crazy times.

[nate heckenberger @nheckenberger]

Mike St. Clair has been West Chester Rustin’s only football coach since becoming a program in 2006. This might be the most he’s smiled since. First district title since 2008 with a 34-2 win over Springfield Delco.

[RustinTrackandField @RustinTF]

@nheckenberger @WCRustinKnights @Rustin_Football Since then they have 8 district titles in:

'22 Girls Track & Softball
'23 Girls Basketball, Girls Track & Boys Lax
'24 Boys Golf, Girls Soccer and Football

Quite the run for Rustin Athletics

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

A step in a new direction... https://t.co/EUwMOH02wm

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

It would be amazing for @WorldAthletics to create a pool of funds, that pays those that sets world records, apart from those that just win gold. It ends when the record is broken. Stories like Bolt, @MJGold create perpetual value and build dreams for future record setters.

[Usain St. Leo Bolt @usainbolt]

Any retroactive payment 😉

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@cs_hatton @PrincetonFTBL @Coach_Flinn @CoachMikeWeick @Rustin_Football Keep up the good work!

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

That's because this dude doesn't know what education is.

He speaks of growing wheat, herding sheep, riding a horse, and so on, but in the era of these skills, this was the kind of education given to slaves.

Only a slave, a person who was owned as property, and used as a machine for a task, could be expected to do one task for his whole life.

A gentleman, or even a freeman of the lower classes, was not a machine for labor, but a person who could be expected to act in his own interests, and thus would need to do many different things throughout his life, depending on what served his goals at the time.

And he would need to be able to independently learn these tasks, rather than needing to be taught them in childhood.

Therefore if a boy was to formally educated, that might include some of gentleman's skills (riding, fighting with a sword, the management of finances), but his education was centered around what education really meant:

A fundamental grounding in how to live and thrive as an independent and free-willed person.

Thus, he was taught the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity:

- Arithmetic
- Geometry
- Music
- Astronomy
- Grammar
- Logic
- Rhetoric

These were not trade skills in the sense that they did not enable the performance of any particular trade or task, but that wasn't the point.

The point was that they taught the young gentleman how to think and learn.

By contrast, modern government schools were founded to train clerks and factory workers at public expense... a servant class with the specific skills necessary to be useful workers, but not the general education to be independent or question their betters?

Have you noticed which two of these arts are utterly absent from a modern government-school "education"?

That's right, logic and rhetoric. Logic is how to arrive at true conclusions from known facts. Rhetoric is how to persuade.

A servant educated in logic might notice that the things he is being told are false. A servant educated in rhetoric might notice the techniques that are being used to persuade him to act in the rulers' interests instead of his own.

If you conceive of your children's education as training in career skills, whether that be growing rice or programming a computer, you are preparing them to be slaves, not free men.

If you properly prepare them to be free men, what skills will be lucrative or useful twenty years from now is irrelevant, because they will be prepared to learn them.

In my opinion, the seven liberal arts of the modern world are:

- Logic: how to derive truth from known facts
- Statistics: how to understand the implications of data
- Rhetoric: how to persuade, and spot persuasion tactics
- Research: how to gather information on an unknown subject
- (Practical) Psychology: how to discern and understand the true motives of others
- Investment: how to manage and grow existing assets
- Agency: how to make decisions about what course to pursue, and proactively take action to pursue it.

Notice that you didn't learn any of these things in school, even if you went to a so-called "liberal arts" college. Instead, they taught you things about mitochondria and calculus and symbolism in Jon Steinbeck novels where a boy has a dog, and the dog dies.

That's because liberal arts, whether you define them as I have, or slightly differently, are the arts of the master, the arts that make one a master, and therefore not be taught in a school for slaves.

Worry less about which "career skills" AI will take over, and more about whether you are training to be, and training your kids to be, high-agency, perceptive, self-motivated people who can navigate an unknowable future with an adaptable mind.

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

Congratulations to my young protege!

[Nick Cionci @nickcionci]

I’m very excited to be named the new QB coach at West Chester East! 🧘‍♂️
@WCEastFootball

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

@EACoachDavis Great job with your team this season

[DJ Brock @CoachDJBrock]

🚨OPINION🚨

IN HS BE ALL IN ON ONE SPORT PER SEASON

COMMIT to the sport you’re playing in each season

Offseason work for the others can wait.

If you only want to focus on one in HS, that’s fine go do that

Don’t waste other coaches’ time being halfway in for their season

[Rohan Grant @MAVERIC_Coach]

https://t.co/gLk9nFKPmc

[COACH PRIME @DeionSanders]

What if you're afforded your opportunity or your chance, are u prepared? Are u ready? Can u handle the pressure, the moment, the expectations or the seriousness? Are u built for this? Can u handle the scrutiny of the position? Please evaluate u because your time is coming & u may only get 1 shot. PREPARE for Success now. #CoachPrime

[RustinTrackandField @RustinTF]

Also congrats to the following for qualifying for the finals tomorrow

@keturahdarwon3 - 100h and 300h
@AvajAlexander -400
And the girls 4x4 of Ava, Keturah, @MaddieMiller204 and @jsnelling2024