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Post details: Book recommendation: Outliers

07/11/2010

Book recommendation: Outliers

Überflieger, Malcolm Gladwell Today I want to recommend another book that I have read some weeks ago. It's "Outliers" with the subtitle "The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell.

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Gladwell explains in his book, why some people are more successful than others. Why are some people geniuses or naturals? If you read the book you will see: there is no thing as a natural talent. Not even Mozart was a natural. The music critic Harold Schonberg said, that he actually "developed late" because Mozart did not produce his greatest works until he had practiced composing for twenty years.

Gladwell tells the stories of Bill Joy who developed the UNIX operating system for Sun, the Beatles who had over thousand gigs in a small strip club in Hamburg before they became famous, and Bill Gates. All these have one in common, they practiced their talent for over 10.000 hours before they became what they were.

This book gives hope to all who think they are not talented enough to archive what they want in life. It seems that all you need is enough practice and discipline. This is true for programmers as well as for musicians, writers and sports. Gladwell shows in the first chapter, that you can tell from the birth date of a person if they will be a great sportsman or not.

Another part of the book describes the difference between intelligence quotient and what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence". You will see that it's not enough to be genius to be successful.

He tells the story of Robert Oppenheimer and a rather unknown person named Cris Langan. They both had a very high IQ and even if they both were considered geniuses, Oppenheimer could join the most well known scientific and military project, despite the fact that he was considered as emotionally unstable during hist studies at the University of Cambridge. He had even tried to poison his tutor Patrick Blackett.

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The story of Cris Langan is completely different though. He was not able to solve even the most trivial problems despite his high IQ. It' the practical intelligence that allows people to be successful. That's another ray of hope for all of us who don't have an IQ that's significantly over one-hundred.

The rest of the book is also very exciting and well written, especially Gladwells explanation, how cultural differences between airline personnel can lead to catastrophes and how airlines are trying to avoid it.

You can use this link if you want to buy it from Amazon.com:

Outliers: The Story of Success

It's an affiliate links, so I will get a few cents if you buy via this link. But you can also just put the book title in the amazon search box if you don't want to use my link. The price for the book will be the same though, as long as you buy it from amazon.

If you have any comments, if you have read the book and want to add something, feel free to contact me at heddesheimer@gmail.com or post a comment right here after this blog post.