My Review 5/5

Is greatness innate? The work of one genius? or are the circumstances one happens onto play a large role in that success? I think this is by far the best book by Gladwell.

This book is a study of how practice and circumstance can come together to generate remarkable results. Book details the mastery of an art as the culmination of 10,000 hours of practice. Which separate those who are merely good (5-8k) and those who are sufficient (<5k).

Another point. We should continuously be liberal with our access for opportunities for all developing minds. Otherwise filters applied over the course of years lend to large achievement gaps. The kid who gets an extra hour of practice a day * 10 years in school results in a master.

On the circumstance front, there are macro-level forces that can favor groups. Ie the lull in birth rates during the depression meant that children of that era had access to far more high-quality opportunities than generations on each side. As they grew up teacher-student ratios were low, as they took jobs entry level labor was in demand and as they took leadership of industries they were in competition with few others. This does NOT diminish the hard work it took to accomplish, it merely observes that hard work applied with greater leverage results in greater accomplishments.

Finally the book delves deep into how cultures rank on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. I was unfamiliar with this and his most famous dimension “power distance indicator”. Anyways the message of this book isn’t ‘look at how these elite few have succeeded’ but more optimistically ‘look at the ways we can provide opportunity to more people to grow humanity’. This concept was briefly discussed in [book:The 80/20 Principle		 181206]. In life your goal should be to draw as many ‘opportunities’ as possible. Some are out of your control, era and location of birth, pedigree, socio-economic upbringing, but many are within your control. Of those that are in your control in the words of [author:John C. Maxwell 68] sow as many seeds as you can as those that germinate will reap great rewards.

Date Read

2017/02/01

Date Added

2017/01/11

Goodreads book information

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3264344

Bookshelves: economics

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/goodreads-csv-to-md

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, Little, Brown & Company 2008 (Audio CD)1

Significant revisions

tags: 2017, book, review, Gladwell, economics

  • Apr 22nd, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • Feb 1st, 2017 Originally published on goodreads

EOF/Footnotes

  1. ISBN: =”1600243916” ↩