Outliers

by Malcolm Gladwell

Short synopsis from Wikipedia

Outliers: The Story of Success is a non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

This was a very inspiring or very dispiriting book depending on how you look at it. The main point I think is that success is not attributed to just your personal effort, where the modern story of success is someone who goes it himself without the help of anyone else and succeeds. This book says even for the cases where you think this is the case, it actually it is not. There are so many factors coming into play that their success is no matter of just hardwork and luck. Of course these two factors are extremely important, but there are other underlying factors that are so weird and trivial that one would just ponder in wonder at such strange correlations to success.

One may not totally agree with all the points made in this book (though I personally agree with most of them), but what is important here is to get you thinking of how these things may have an effect on your life and not be oblivious to the factors affecting you. Ignorance is bliss, and more knowledge may bring more worries and stress, because some things are just out of your control. But I believe there is a third stage after that where if you know enough and know your limitations, you will learn acceptance and work within those frameworks for personal betterment. So it is better to try and be defeated rather than to not try at all. Like the common addage, Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.