Discover Outliers: The Success Formula
Malcolm Gladwell is a good book writer and journalist. I think he has written three books in total: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. The common feature of these three books is that one is more popular than one, and it becomes a hot topic as soon as it comes out.
In the book Outliers, the public library in our small town (with a population of less than 100,000) bought 8 copies at a time. Because it was too popular, I only allowed one week to borrow it once (the average book is three weeks).
There are still twenty or thirty people waiting in line for two months. The book reviews of this book are overwhelming. Even Amazon launched the Kindle 2 a few days ago and used it as a background photo.
Like every book written by a reporter, the views in this book are not new, not scientific breakthroughs or academic progress.
The strength of reporters is that they have new ideas for ordinary people who don’t read and think often.
Having said these words, what I want to say next is that this book is very valuable. Its greatest value is to get rid of ordinary people’s superstition of “successful people”.
The so-called “outliers” are those individuals in the statistical sample who deviate too far from the average, that is, those who are not a little bit stronger than the average person, but are so strong that you feel that they are not the same as you.
Why are they so awesome? Superstitious thinking is that they are “The ONE”. We can see this kind of thinking repeatedly in Hollywood movies: they may have been bitten by weird spiders and changed their DNA, they are more likely to be born with talents, or are the destiny of the prophecy. In short, their success is because they are different. People.
The point of Outlier’s book is that successful people are actually ordinary people, heroes created by the times.
Let me summarize the content of this book:
- If you want to do a special job, for example, you want to be an ice hockey player, the timing of your birth is very important.
Canadian ice hockey players and many other athletes have birthdays in January, February, and March.
Because the Canadian selection of ice hockey players is based on the age of birth on January 1, children born in January have a small advantage because they grow older small advantage is gradually amplified by the Matthew effect: they get more because of this.
Training opportunities, such as entering a good team, so you become better, so enter a better team.
Even ordinary people pay attention to the date of birth when they go to school. Children born in September are actually the oldest in class when they enter school because it happens to be the beginning of the school year.
Therefore, they learn better, and are more confident, after the Matthew effect is amplified, they have performed well all the way to university. Statistics show that there is a score advantage of more than 10%!
－ After investigating Bill Joy of Sun, Gates of Microsoft, and The Beatles, the conclusion is that success comes from 10,000 hours of practice.
Here the author does not describe the practice itself, what he is concerned about is the conditions of the practice. Bill Joy’s opportunity was when he was 17 years old, just in time for the University of Michigan to have a computer laboratory, and he gained endless hours through system bugs.
Gates’ example is very similar. In high school, I got computer time thanks to the sponsorship of a wealthy classmate’s mother, and then I got a chance at the University of Washington.
How many young people were able to obtain such conditions on the machine in that era? almost none. At that time, many professors who practiced university computers did not have the opportunity to have unlimited time!
During the computer revolution, the best time to start a business was 1975. At that time, the spread of personal computers became possible.
And 20-year-olds are best suited to do this at this time, and from this, computer heroes are best born around 1955.
In fact, this is exactly the case: Gates 1955, Bill Joy 1954,…how many heroes for a while. [I further deduced: In order for a person to truly become a computer expert, apart from passing through his youth when programming began to become popular, there is another condition that video games were not yet popular at that time!]
- IQ is to success what height is to basketball. Within a certain height, the higher the better, but after a certain line, no matter how high it is, it may not be good.
- The biggest advantage of children from wealthy and middle-class families is their strong practical intelligence: from elementary school, how can they have equal conversations with authorities, take the initiative to ask questions, make jokes, and control the situation.
This is why Oppenheimer’s crisis (gossip: this person tried to murder his mentor when he was a graduate student) can be resolved through negotiation. Family origin is so important.
- One of the major discoveries of this book is that the year and date of birth determine the destiny of a person, and the phenomenon of crowd theory is discovered.
To become a successful New York lawyer, the best route is to be born into a Jewish immigrant family in New York in 1930.
The first generation of these Jewish immigrants are often tailors and other handicraftsmen
The second generation has their own small business, and
The third generation is all doctors and lawyers. Born at that time, you will catch up with the best time for New York public schools, get the best education, and then just catch up with starting a new lawyer business.
- The second part of this book talks about the impact of environment and culture on a person.
For example, mountain culture is a culture of honor, where grievances must be repaid, Korean culture absolutely obeys authority, and rice culture in southern China believes that hard work is a fruit.
The most interesting point is that these cultures are originally caused by the geographical environment, but when the people of these cultures are separated from their geographical environment, such as how many generations and hundreds of years have passed after immigrating to the United States, their descendants still inherit this cultural tradition.
At the end of the audiobook, I listened to, an interview with the author is attached.
He mentioned how he succeeded: He is a Canadian, and his own success comes from the help of two friends he has known since the first grade of elementary school. These two friends later became characters in the New York Times and Harvard University respectively.
After listening to this book, I feel that people are like charged particles in an electromagnetic field.
In scientific research, we are often interested in those electrons or protons that have obtained extremely high energies. They account for a small proportion and can be called outliers among charged particles.
Could it be that these electrons themselves are special? In fact, all electrons are identical. They just appeared in the right place in the electromagnetic field at the right time!
Successful people are influenced by the environment, and at the same time, their high energy can also influence the environment these high-speed particles will also affect the surrounding electromagnetic field… Everything is physics :)
Finally, I think if one wants to study how to make “Own” successful, this book is of little significance. On the contrary, people in government departments should read this book and study how to create an environment that allows children in their own country to have “computer-based” conditions that are not available to professors in other countries. So although this book does not have more technical content, it is very “high-end”.
