Previous Post: Stupid Tax: Frozen and Burst Water Pipes
Book Review Preview: Outliers
I recently received a review copy of the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. To be honest, I had not previously heard of this author but the book sounded quite intriguing. The subtitle of the book is "The Story of Success" (c’mon, you agree that piques your interest, right?)
I finally started reading it (I have quite a list of books to read and am only slowly working my way through them) and it has absolutely not disappointed. In fact, it is quite enlightening and I have already found myself discussing it with friends on numerous occasions.
How can you not like a book that starts off discussing Canadian junior hockey teams and quickly moves to software tycoons, the Beatles, geniuses, lawyers, and immigrants making it big in the early-American garment industry. And that’s only in the first part of the book – Opportunity. The second part, Legacy, takes off from Appalachia…and that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
The Opportunity section of the book is chock full of interesting information on how to truly view success – specifically the necessary ingredients to achieve it. Gladwell posits that there are numerous other factors that lead to success besides the obvious ones that we so often hear bandied about – being smart and working hard. Remember, this is just a preview so here are a few questions to whet your appetite:
Do you notice anything interesting about the birth years of these US computer moguls?
- Bill Gates – 1955
- Paul Allen – 1953
- Steve Ballmer – 1956
- Steve Jobs – 1955
- Eric Schmidt (Novell then Google) – 1955
- Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems) – 1954
- Scott McNealy (Sun) – 1954
- Vinod Khosla (Sun) – 1955
- Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun) – 1955
Why were 11 of the 22 members of the 2007 Czech junior national hockey team born during January, February, and March while only two on the same team were born in October, November, and December?
I am excited to finish this book and I’m hoping that there will be some sort of takeaway that will help me apply the knowledge the author shares in this book. It is all very interesting, but I am wondering whether it will turn out to be practical or just informational. To be fair, so far I have found two extremely useful bits of information regarding education and preparing your children for success (I will share those later as well).
When I finish reading the book, I will do a full review of it. In fact, I may have to do more than one. At the very least, some of the topics covered by Gladwell will certainly spark a few blog posts of their own! I am enjoying this book and am very excited to pre-announce that I will do a giveaway of the book when I post the complete review of it. So, please stay tuned for that as it will be the very first giveaway in the short history of Borrow From None.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
If you found this post informative or entertaining (or both), please subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email to receive future Borrow From None posts.
Thank you for visiting!
Comments
5 Responses to “Book Review Preview: Outliers”
Leave a Reply
Subscribe to Borrow From None
Affiliates
-
Social Networking
Links of Interest
What is RSS?
I read “Blink” by the same author – it is also a good read.
Outliers is on my list, but it might be awhile before I get there, I always want to read much more than I have time for.
@L – I do highly recommend that you get around to reading Outliers. I have been impressed by the author and will be adding his others to my list – I’ll probably try to read Blink first.
John, do you think anyone will think the picture on the front page of your blog is you and not Malcolm Gladwell? There is almost a resemblance, but not really. He is a pretty goofy looking guy, although an extremely wealhty one for writing great books and being on the speaker circuit. Blessings, Fletch
@Fletch – I hadn’t actually noticed the resemblance. Then again, as my hair grows longer, I guess maybe I am looking more and more like Gladwell every day….especially when I don’t put any “product” in it.
Yeah, if being smart and working hard were the only factors to success we’d all be rich and famous. I think there’s something in the way of thinking, in attitude towards oneself and others that really leads to success.
Yeah, as I cannot change my birth date, I’ll probably have to change my attitude and prove that my year is cool too
Anyway, thank you for the review. I like these pep-talk books!