Something about
Gladwell's books makes me feel like I'm supposed to read them in an airport. I
was able to fight that feeling long enough to get through Outliers this week.
The book is every bit as interesting and entertaining as Tipping Point and
Blink, and is just as easy of a read.
A few random
thoughts on the book:
I liked the point
that it requires about 10,000 of practice to be good at pretty much
anything.
I agree that many, many aspects of life depend on external forces and timing.
However, I'd really
like to see Gladwell apply his Outliers model to a guy like Richard Branson and
see how he's been able to be so successful across so many different
categories.
Along the same
lines, it'd be interesting to find the outliers' outlier, the ones who've
been successful outside of some massive environmental
updraft.
The book reminded me
of one of my long held philosophies of life, one which crystallized when I read
Sun Tzu's Art of War. Sun Tzu writes about how to use the terrain to your
advantage and how you should arrive early to the battlefield (you can read the full text by following the links this
sentence). I've always mushed those together into the philosophy that you
should, as much as possible, position yourself in contexts where the environment
is working for you. If you're prepared and operating from the right
platform(s) then you're basically swimming with the current.
I guess this is a
more tactical application of the same basic thinking as Gladwell's Outlier
philosophy, but in my case, I can (to some degree) control the environment into
which I place myself, whereas in many of the Outlier examples many of the
critical variables are decided for me (like the year I'm born).
So, whereas I think Gladwell makes some wonderful points, there's a sense in the book that much of success is decided for you. I prefer to believe there's a lot more under my control, if I'm just creative about how I approach the problem and do what I can to have the terrain fight for me.
But I'm probably just delusional, Malcom, is 1971 a good vintage for a digital media investment banker guy???
So, whereas I think Gladwell makes some wonderful points, there's a sense in the book that much of success is decided for you. I prefer to believe there's a lot more under my control, if I'm just creative about how I approach the problem and do what I can to have the terrain fight for me.
But I'm probably just delusional, Malcom, is 1971 a good vintage for a digital media investment banker guy???