Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Outliers: The Story of Success


Title: Outliers
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Series:None
Genre: Non-Fiction


A NYT Bestseller, and it had a math term on the front. It didn't sound like a book that I would normally read, but I decided to give it a go anyway. Boy was I glad I did.

I read introduction and almost put it down after a few pages, but decided if it's so high on all those lists it must be decent. I kept reading. I think the fact that Chapter 1 was about hockey players really helped to solidify it for me. This book is incredible. I don't want to say it has changed my life, but it was definitely given my brain some food for thought.

Each chapter of the book looks at someone (or several) who are famous. He is proving (or tying?) that each of these people are successful for reasons other then hard work and things of that nature.

Chapter 1 for example tells of aforementioned hockey players. In looking at famous hockey players, most of them (a very significant number) have birthdays in Jan/Feb/March. Why is this? He looks further into it and it comes about that the cut off age for each age group makes these kids the oldest. This makes them the bigger ones who have had more practice. Therefore they are picked out early as better, given better resources and more time to play making them even better which leads to...ect. ect.

He looks at famous musicians (The Beatles and others), Bill Gates, Founder of Apple, and those are in just the first few chapters.

I am highly enjoyed this book for thought, and think I may delve into his others. Surprisingly I'm didn't chow through it because it was so thought provoking that sometimes I just sat there with the book and would think without reading. Overall I highly enjoyed looking for the patterns in each group.

On a totally different note...Hunted, the most recent addition to the House of Night Novels came out today. I wanted to buy it, but told myself I must wait to borrow from library. At least I'm only wait list #7.

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