I just finished reading the book "Outliers The story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell and I can say this is the best book I have read so far. There is something about the way things are explained in this book that captivated me; the author describes how success is not only the result of the person's hard work or ingenuity but is deeply connected with our upbringing, the culture we grew up in and the opportunities we got when we needed them. The most mind-boggling example is of Bill Gates who most people think is a genius who dropped out of Harvard to start his own company and due to his ingenuity was able to raise a successful company. But, as is explained in the book and which Gates also agrees by saying that he 'was very lucky', Gates got an unusual opportunity; in 1968, when he was in his eighth grade, his school purchased a 'time-sharing machine' which was a very sophisticated computer at that time that allowed many people to connect to the terminal at the same time using telephone cables and run their code. Remember, this was 1968 and Gates also says that he would be 'stunned' if there were more than 50 people in the whole world who had that kind of opportunity. A lot of other examples of famous people are explained in the book including the Beatles, the Canadian Hockey team selection and so on that are quite surprising. Gladwell has a knack of observing connections between things that most people would simply ignore saying it happened out of sheer luck.
Here is a list of things from the book that simply amazed me:
1. The 10,000-Hour Rule: You need to practice something for at least 10,000 hours if you want to be truly successful. Examples:
(i) The Beatles were not that famous until they performed in Hamburg, Germany. They performed for 1200 times during the course of a year and a half which is astonishing; most bands do not perform that many times in their entire career.
(ii) Bill Joy: He wrote UNIX and is a famous scientist but he did not do that only due to his intelligence. He spent hours writing programs sometimes even till two or three in the morning. The hours he spent writing programs until he became ready to write UNIX was almost 10,000.
2. Mind-boggling connection: All of the four founders of Sun Microsystems were born between 1954 and 1955. The connection between their birth year and their success? In January 1975, a minicomputer was invented that was inexpensive, small in size compared to the huge machines that were called computers back then and in order to seize the opportunity of programming it, a person born around 1955 would be young enough and if he had the enthusiasm and the experience of writing programs, he would be the ideal. No one was better fitting to the job than Gates, Bill Joy and other people with similar background.
3. General intelligence and practical intelligence are Orthogonal.
4. Hard work is a prison sentence if only it does not have meaning.
5. Korean flight accident and how much culture influenced how the first pilot and flight engineer reported the problems they had seen to their senior captain. Quote: Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
6. The Chinese, Korean and Japanese have a logical counting system where eleven is ten-one, twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on. The result? They can perform calculations much faster. Eg. 37+22=59, when asked to a child whose native language is English, he has to do the calculation in his head but if we ask that to a Chinese child, he will say the answer right away: three-tens-seven plus two-tens-two equals five-tens-nine.
7. "A belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty": Reference to the Chinese farmers who worked diligently in the rice fields all year long and 360 days a year. This cultivated a sense of hard work in their children.
8. TIMSS exam: Math and science test for students from different countries. Before the actual exam, there is a questionnaire with 120 questions that asks the students about their parents' educational level and so on. The countries which come first in those tests have students who answer all those 120 questions before beginning the actual test while students from other countries leave as many as 20 questions unanswered.
9. "The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."
Reference:
* Outliers, the story of success, Malcolm Gladwell.
Here is a list of things from the book that simply amazed me:
1. The 10,000-Hour Rule: You need to practice something for at least 10,000 hours if you want to be truly successful. Examples:
(i) The Beatles were not that famous until they performed in Hamburg, Germany. They performed for 1200 times during the course of a year and a half which is astonishing; most bands do not perform that many times in their entire career.
(ii) Bill Joy: He wrote UNIX and is a famous scientist but he did not do that only due to his intelligence. He spent hours writing programs sometimes even till two or three in the morning. The hours he spent writing programs until he became ready to write UNIX was almost 10,000.
2. Mind-boggling connection: All of the four founders of Sun Microsystems were born between 1954 and 1955. The connection between their birth year and their success? In January 1975, a minicomputer was invented that was inexpensive, small in size compared to the huge machines that were called computers back then and in order to seize the opportunity of programming it, a person born around 1955 would be young enough and if he had the enthusiasm and the experience of writing programs, he would be the ideal. No one was better fitting to the job than Gates, Bill Joy and other people with similar background.
3. General intelligence and practical intelligence are Orthogonal.
4. Hard work is a prison sentence if only it does not have meaning.
5. Korean flight accident and how much culture influenced how the first pilot and flight engineer reported the problems they had seen to their senior captain. Quote: Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from - and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
6. The Chinese, Korean and Japanese have a logical counting system where eleven is ten-one, twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on. The result? They can perform calculations much faster. Eg. 37+22=59, when asked to a child whose native language is English, he has to do the calculation in his head but if we ask that to a Chinese child, he will say the answer right away: three-tens-seven plus two-tens-two equals five-tens-nine.
7. "A belief in work ought to be a thing of beauty": Reference to the Chinese farmers who worked diligently in the rice fields all year long and 360 days a year. This cultivated a sense of hard work in their children.
8. TIMSS exam: Math and science test for students from different countries. Before the actual exam, there is a questionnaire with 120 questions that asks the students about their parents' educational level and so on. The countries which come first in those tests have students who answer all those 120 questions before beginning the actual test while students from other countries leave as many as 20 questions unanswered.
9. "The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."
Reference:
* Outliers, the story of success, Malcolm Gladwell.
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