Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

We've all heard the stories of "self made men" and those whose rise to the top of their respective fields reads like a bedtime story. "You can be whatever you want", the parents say. "All you have to do is work hard". But is it really that simple?

Outliers is a look into the lives of successful people, operating under the assumption that no one becomes successful on their own. Rather, it's generally a combination of several different factors that can include one's birth date, what jobs their parents had, where their ancestors were from, and how many hours they spent perfecting their craft.

I feel as though I don't quite do Outliers justice when describing it to someone, which I have been enthusiastically doing for a couple of weeks now. It's not, as one friend put it, "some of that Who Moved My Cheese shit", nor is it a dry, textbook full of dull facts about even duller people. It's exciting, looking into a person's history, finding out about the extraordinary opportunities they've had -such as Bill Gates being one of the few teenagers in the 70's with a computer club at his school- or the circumstances that surround someone's birth that ultimately shape their future -such as the reasons most professional hockey players from Canada's birthdays take place in the beginning of the year.

In Outliers you'll discover several unique situations regarding success and failure and explanations of how they that they're linked by a few simple concepts. I don't want to give away everything (as many of the conclusions were came to be. Canadian hockey players, Silicon Valley computer wizards, the feuding families of rural Appalachia, and even Gladwell's own family, the situations presented in this book are so diverse that it's amazing to think spoiled for me before I even received the book), but something that is especially interesting to me is when Gladwell makes the case that for someone to truly be able to excel at something, they must first put in around 10,000 hours of practice in it. Not that everyone who does that will succeed, but with that much practice it's hard to be a complete failure. I couldn't help but think of what, if anything, I've spent 10,000 hours concentrating on and the thought occurred to me that thanks to the ridiculous amount of useless knowledge I've accumulated over the years, my destiny in life is to be one hell of a game show contestant.

Part of why I am and have been so enthusiastic about Outliers is that it's affected me in a way that no other book has in a long time. As some regular readers know, I've been sick for the past week and it was difficult to read during that time. That doesn't mean, however, that I didn't think about the book. On the contrary, I haven't looked at a hockey player since without wondering what his birthday is. I've been looking for patterns relating to success virtually everywhere. Sure, maybe a little obsessive, and I may or may not have had a fever, but damn it, I have good intentions!

Bottom line: if you've ever been curious about anything for a single moment in your life, pick this book up. You'll love it. If not, well, there's probably a fun puzzle on the back of a cereal box you could check out.

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