Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A book of success. For today’s computer scientist, it’s more like a book of machine learning application (haha.. I know I didn’t have to include this analogy :P..) - bunch of features related to the person himself/herself, the society they were born in, the date, time, year, family and place of birth, their class and all other imaginable and unimaginable things all end up contributing to the person’s life - success, failure and everything that happens to them.
While this seems very obvious right now, it’s not always how people tend to perceive success stories. More often than not, we see different sorts of books which illustrate all the things that a person did, the traits they exhibited, the way they acted, etc. This book just uses the person and what they’re famous for and doesn’t talk about all that the other books normally do. Gladwell here discusses all the hidden forces behind what made Bill Gates and Steve Jobs be the software entrepreneur, reason behind plane crashes not related to the pilots’ ability and other such examples.
It’s an interesting read in attempt to understand how legacies, cultural background, time of opportunities and other remote things can end up influencing aspects of someone’s life. Couple this with the hard-work and dedication that is more often talked about in the self-help books, memoirs, etc gives us a success story that we know.
The book attempts to show us that success stories (also often called outliers) are not indeed a result of hard-work, grit and determination of a single person against all odds. It’s a project of many things working out in favor in a larger scheme of things over a longer period of time that makes these outliers. And mind that none of these variables are unique. Hence making the outliers not really outliers. Read on to know the untold background story and know some interesting influences that are play in now famous success stories.
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