Roseyland

Good news! I have unlocked the key to success. Quick tangent. How do you unlock a key? Isn’t a key the thing you unlock stuff with? Never mind. By “unlocked” I mean that I read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I love this book, it blew my mind and it reminds me of one of my other favorite books, Freakonomics. Some people are passionate about books like Catcher In The Rye, but not me, I get excited about books with statistics and sociological studies. I know, just when you thought I couldn’t get any cooler.

Outliers looks at a variety of successful people and tries to determine what factors led to their success. The shocking conclusion: hard work and luck. Okay, so that isn’t exactly shocking, but the details are surprising. Did you know that kids born in the fall do better in school than kids born in the spring? Why? Because they are the oldest in their class, and when you are young, that makes a big difference. A difference that can last throughout your life. I was born in June and was always one of the youngest in my class. Just think, if I had been born a few months later. I’d probably be curing cancer right now instead of writing this blog. Oh well, you win some you lose some. Here are a few fun facts I picked up in Outliers:

• It takes 10000 hours of hard practice to become an expert at something. 10000 hours? Really? I wish somebody had told me that 10000 hours ago.
• If you are comfortable telling you boss when he (or she) is being an idiot, you would make a good pilot.
• Public schools are not failing poor kids, but summer vacations are.
• And a lot of other stuff…

What I like most about Outliers is that it challenges many of our preconceived notions about success. Yes hard work is important, but so are a lot of other factors. Many of these factors are highly counter intuitive, like what month a person is born in. Outliers isn’t a self help style business book or a book with some sort of ideological bias. Outliers looks at real data and comes to real conclusions. This provides the type of understanding necessary to make real change, and I think that’s cool. Plus, it’s fun to read. So like, go read it… now. Or not, whatever.