OVER-RATED

First things first, I'm quite sick of loggin onto AnD's front page and seeing this cat, who shall remain unnamed, facedropping like a motherfucker. What's a facedrop? It's like namedropping (mentioning important people's names to show off) but using pictures to show how many famous people you know (yeah I made up the word "facedrop"). We've had two actors die recently and every time I log in it's the dude facedropping with pictures of the deceased. His profile pic is a facedropping pic of him next to a star (I have a picture with him too. Maybe I should facedrop and make that my profile pic. Yeah right). Enough is enough. The two are dead--show some fucking respect instead of trying to prop your own fucking status.

Second, I want to talk about two books I find overrated. The first is The Elements of Style and the second is Malcom Gladwell's Outliers.

The Elements of Style is an American English writing guide that's informative and useful. However, it's also a fucking bore to read. The other "teach yo ass how to write" book I bought yesterday, "My Grammar and I" flows better, breaks up sections with fun facts, and the authors don't take themselves so seriously--it's just a better read. Both book gets the job done, but one book is a chore to read, the other is not.

Now moving onto Outliers... It's a book written by Malcom Gladwell, who came up with all these ideas and concepts such as "the tipping point" (about how little things, no matter how small, can matter when it builds up momentum), "the 10,000 hours rule" (if you do one thing over and over, by the time you get to the 10,000 hour mark you'll be good at it), and others.

Now I'm not saying the theories aren't accurate or whatever. But all he does is provide straight forward numbers and boring examples of boring people to prove his point.

On the other hand, Gladwell's good friend, Sportswriter Bill Simmons, also came up with a bunch of theories himself. There's the "Ewing theory" (when a collected group of individuals step up and overachieve after their leader goes down, thus exposing how overrated said leader was) and "The 150 Minute theory" (about how no event should last longer than 150 minutes, unless it is very, very, very good)

In fact, Bill Simmons came up with something similar to the 10,000 hours rule before Gladwell put it on print. He wrote a piece about "Playoff Reps" a few years back, it talks about the fact that no matter how good or talented a team/player is, they still need to build up their "playoff repetition" (by playing in them and losing/coming up short) at least a few times over until you can get the hump.

Simmons' concepts and style are eerily similar to Gladwell (Simmons also has a 1,000 games theory where he determined most basketball players will start their decline after they played in their 1,000th game)

The difference between the two (for me)? Simmons makes it fun.

Would you rather read boring data and stories on BIll Gates geeky childhood or have Simmons paint a scenario using pop culture references? In Simmon's " Vengeance Scale" (a scale he came up with to measure the amount of anger/bitterness/vengeance in someone), he uses examples from films (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle), music (Tupac's Hit 'Em Up), and TV shows such as 90210 (when that evil bitch Valerie slept with everyone) to gauge the level of VENGEANCE.

It gets the same point across and it's infinitely more interesting to read. Why the need to be so serious and straightforward? Can't we take things lighter?

Now keep in mind overrated doesn't mean bad. Something can be overrated and still be very, very good (Kobe is an example). So I'm not bashing The Elements of Style or Malcom Gladwell. Both books taught me plenty.

They just overrated. Just sayin'.