Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
5/∞
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Do you wish to understand success and how it happens? Do you want to know how it is possible that some of the poorest Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in Manhattan managed to built the most prominent law firms in the USA? Could that be related to the date they have been born (e.g. 1930s)? Or was it just a sheer luck?
Now, this is one of the most inspirational book I have read so far! Malcom Gladwell has taken a very different approach on success in comparison to lay people’s view on success. His approach is analytical and well narrated.
As he suggests that “the American dream and the idea of a self-made man” is delusional as success depends on many different factors.
The book is divided into 10 chapters. Each of them is narrating a story of something what could be called “an ingredient of success.” Success apparently comes down to: when you were born, timing of your skills, your environment, cultural background, school you went into and whether or not you have been given a chance.
Czech ice hockey team
Most of the Czech ice hockey players on national team were born in three months: Jan, Feb and March. Why? Because kids born at the beginning of the year are more developed than those born e.g. in December. Until the age of 10, this brings the earlier a massive advantage. There is a suggestion that success is cumulative (the more success you have the more opportunities you are given), so kids born at the beginning of the year have more attention of coaches and are improving faster than their counterparts born toward the end of the year.
The 10,000-hour rule
In order to master a certain skill (e.g. investing, language, car/motorcycle repair, oil painting) you need 10,000 hours of practice. What have Bill Gates and Beatles to do with the 10,000-hour rule? You need to somehow practice 10,000 hours and then be given opportunity to work hard and sell your skills.
“It's not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else,“ Rif kind says. ”It's that they had a skill that they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”
Harlan, Kentucky
Culture is an important heritage, because it explains how and why certain people act in a way they do. I think that Harlan, Kentucky is a story of Welsh Valleys. Do not underestimate the cultural heritage when dealing with people.
Why are Asians so good in math?
Is it because they are smarter than European and American kids? Could the difference lay down in the way of how European and Asian languages deal with numbers? You’d be surprised, but it does.
There is way more, but my FB post is already way too long!
Favourite quotes:
“”Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.””
“”Jarvis had studied 1,741 cases of insanity and concluded that "over-study" was responsible for of 205 them. "Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder," Jarvis wrote.””
“”To come to New York City in the with a background in dressmaking or sewing or 1890s “Schnittwaren Handlung” was a stroke of extraordinary good fortune. It was like showing up in Silicon Valley in with ten thousand hours of computer programming 1986 already under your belt.””
“”Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been book binders or watchmakers.””
“”Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.””
““Hofstede, similarly, references a study done a few years ago that compared German and French manufacturing plants that were in the same industry and were roughly the same size. The French plants had, on average, 26 percent of their employees in management and specialist positions; the Germans, 16 percent. The French, furthermore, paid their top management substantially more than the Germans did. What we are seeing in that comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have a power distance index twice that of the Germans. They require and support hierarchy in a way the Germans simply don’t.””
To succeed means to come across a combo of many different favouring events. The end of the book is a bit mystical and philosophical. I can highly recommend it!!!
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Feel free to share and comment or recommend books you find inspirational.
Peace
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