Outliers

On my flight to Vegas, while I was reading one of Vince Flynn's fiction novels, a well-accomplished-looking man was sitting next to me, engrossed in a book of his own. I mean, he could not put this book down. Turns out he was reading "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell and gave it a glowing recommendation. This peaked my interest. I had just finished reading Gladwell's book "Blink" a few months ago. Loved it. I'd heard a bit about "Outliers" lately, and figured it was time to read it for myself. My flight to Texas provided the perfect opportunity to start reading the book, and I quickly become engrossed in it as well. It's an easy read, very logical, and I found myself agreeing with Gladwell a lot. He has a great ability to take a complex situation, analyze it, and provide a conclusion that's slightly out of the norm, but makes perfect sense. If you are looking for something to read, I highly recommend this book. Essentially, Gladwell points out that success is not self-made. It is a product of culture, good timing, seizing opportunities, and working hard.

If you've read my blog before, you know I love quoting things, so here's 2 quotes that impacted me:

Those three things -- autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward -- are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine to five. It's whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year or working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take?...Work that fulfills those 3 criteria is meaningful...Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

It's not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try...Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Sure, those quotes seem pretty simple, maybe pretty obvious, but in the context of this book and the stories and examples Gladwell uses along the way, they make you view success differently than how society as a whole might view success.