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Outliers

the Story of Success
May 15, 2017DrFolklore rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
Outliers is a book to make you question your assumptions about life, and about people who are pre-eminent in their fields. Gladwell, a Canadian, is a writer for The New Yorker, so, of course, his book is both thoughtful and highly readable. He is not so much a researcher, as a thinker who reads the research of others, connects seemingly unrelated ideas, then show the patterns throughout. Some of the ideas covered in this book are so well-know that many of us are already familiar with them, either because of Gladwell's writings or because other journalists used the same sources. Outliers examines so-called "successful" people, and shows that, while hard work and focus are important elements in their achievements, other factors -- essentially, being in the right place at the right time with the right background -- are immensely important. He illustrates this with numerous examples showing, for instance, that if you speak Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, you'll have a major head start in counting and in doing math in you head over speakers of European languages, and, that the legendary figures of Silicone Valley were all born within about three years, and, as teenagers, had access to computers not dreamed of by others. We learn why, unless your kids are rare exceptions such as Sydney Crosby , you can forget about them becoming NHL players if they wasn't born in the first half of the year. (Do your own research this by looking up hockey players' birthdays on Wikipedia.) Outliers is a healthy antidote to the many business and self-help books promising that you can will, meditate, pray, or visualize your way to fame and fortune. Gladwell even uses his own history to show us that flukiness is an important factor in defining our reach and limitations, and in determining how well we do in life.