So I'm sitting here listening to Billie Holiday and letting the ideas from Outliers sift through my brain. It has been a most interesting beginning to the season. I started shorthanded on Saturday by choice and with the permission of my crew, who both rock if anyone wants to know. Thinking about Outliers and about success and the origins of success and how no one succeeds in a vacuum which is something I've always known but still there's something in my cultural and personal upbringing that says a person Can fight their way to the top... but really, even that is likely just a choice of turning a horrible situation, point for point into advantages and then of course, like in the case of immigrant's children raised by parents doing useful work in the garment district and sure they couldn't do anything else, but then that's why when they did what they chose to do, they did it so Well...

Yeah. Gladwell has a way of saying things I thought I knew, but in a way that makes me pretty sure I never really did. Meaningful work, work that has a direct consequence, a verifiable effect, the more effort, the more success, the more rewards... it's why I've always liked selling. Not only do my sales change how much money I make, but I can see the transformation in a customer when suddenly they go from jeans and t-shirt drab to seeing themselves, being seen by those around them, as briefly, momentarily someone inherently interesting. I love that moment when they look in the mirror and they slouch a little less or maybe their chin goes up a fraction when I remind them to take off the baseball cap and nothing will ever beat that instant when a woman who was already beautiful and in love and married to an apparently fantastic guy and still she walked out of the dressing room and when she looked, she gasped... Yeah. There are reasons for what I do, no matter what else gets in the way or how some days are nothing but trouble and mud.

To borrow from Mister Tim Minchin for a moment, "It's not perfect, but it's mine."