Outliers

~ Malcolm Gladwell

This book puts into perspective how success is actually achieved compared to how society portrays success.

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3 Interesting Things About Outliers

1. Outliers teach us that success doesn’t always blossom from intelligence and ambition but also a little bit of luck can make a world of difference.
2. Talks about how our culture, family, and generation can greatly impact success even though those traits are largely immutable.
3. Malcolm argues that we look at success in the wrong way. That we found too much on their lifestyle and daily routine, instead of what opportunities did these people have that others were not awarded.

3 Favorite Quotes From Outliers

1. Appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
2. It is only by asking where they [the successful] are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
3. Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

Notes

Outliers is a great book for understanding how we should perceive success. Not only does it take an intelligent creative mind with a lot of hard work but a lot of luck can contribute to these outliers’ success.

My favorite chapter is where he writes about why Asians are good at math. Malcolm shows that in many Asian cultures their languages make it very easy to compute math in their head.

One, this is because the pronunciation of the numbers has fewer syllables than in English so it is quicker to read and think about. Two, the larger numbers make sense. In English 13 is written out and said like “thirteen”, while in Asian cultures the way they write out and say their number is like “one three”. So because of the pronunciation of the number, makes it quick and easy to do these computations.

I find it quite interesting how based on what culture you were brought up in and the language that you were raised to speak can affect things like how well you are at math.