Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Again a very interesting and light read where the authors highlights that success is not just based on talent and skill. A lot of other factors including luck, the time you were born, your parents, environment and many more external factors contribute as much if not more to a person's success. The examples he gives are quite convincing too. I would almost say its a must read book for anyone interested in reading about people and life...

Some highlights and examples from the book are shared below:

• A lot of external events affect success. One example is the date or month you are born. A lot of games have a cutoff date when young children are chosen to be trained. And children born right after that date, are at an advantage as they are a year older than the rest when the next cutoff date comes. So they are more often selected and trained more and make it big. While other children who were born later in the year don't get in and generally do less better on an average
• The ten thousand hour rule means that if a person is talented, he or she needs to practice the art for at least 10,000 hours to become a master of it
• Being a genius helps only up to a specific level of IQ. After that it is other parameters like creativity and thinking out of the box that makes a person successful, not how much higher his or her IQ is
• Geniusness only gets you part of the way. But you cannot do it alone only on the basic of intelligence. You need the community, the family and the right environment around you to support you and lead you to success
• In fact, all these factors together - your background and bringing up, the year you were born and graduated and even the business your parents were in - can define your success. The author uses these so well to explain why all the hot shot corporate lawyers in NY today are all Jewish, born to first generation immigrant families from Europe and whose parents all were in the garments business when they came to the US!
• Where we come from affects our actions even centuries later. For e.g,, the 'culture of honour' which is prevalent in the southern part of US is all based on aggressive attitudes from the communities from south of Scotland who came to the US. Back there, they were a herd based economy and people from such cultures are more aggressive than usual. And they have retained their behaviour and actions even after being in the US for centuries now
• Similarly plane crashes sometimes happened because of cultural aspects from the societies the captains and first officers were from. If they were from hierarchical societies which forbid first officers from clearly disagreeing with their captains, it hampered security protocols for a long time till the airlines made changes to get over these cultural overhangs.
• Asian countries are good at mathematics as their language makes it easier and more logical to learn Maths. But the bigger reason is that these societies were paddy based economies, and rice fields need a lot more hardwork and skill than other kind of agriculture and gathering based lives. So these societies believed in working hard and reaping higher rewards for more hardwork. These are societies where the belief is the harder you worker, the more rewards you get. And this is still a part of their ethos.
• Built on the same logic, there are schools in America which make the students from less privileged backgrounds work very very hard and not give them any vacation either so that they do better. And it works.
• As a summary, all these factors played a part in the story of the author, Malcolm Gladwell. His parents got lucky and got opportunities which made them successful, just by being born at the right year right after an educational reform which got his mother an education abroad. 

Luck plays such an important part in life, its good to read a book which accepts that...