Outliers Review
I’m crossposting this from good reads, because part of the reason that my blog content has suffered is that I’m writing more at other places. Mostly facebook, but posts at other places as well. There should be a way to automate this…I wonder if there’s a good reads wordpress plugin? Also, definitely thanks to Anne for leaving this one here for me to read.
Outliers is a brilliant and fantastic book. It explores, in depth, the key pieces of our lives that make people outstanding successes. Malcolm Gladwell concentrates, obviously enough, on the outliers. The fantastic successes that everyone likes to talk about…and he makes a very convincing case that it is a combination of luck and hard work that makes people successful. It is an absolutely necessary read for anyone living in our modern world, it should be mandatory for children as soon as they’re able to handle it. It should be law that anyone the REALLY, TRULY believes they’re self-made should be REQUIRED to read this book.
That said, I do have some minor complaints. Gladwell’s definition of success is very narrow. His summary is basically that hard work is it’s own reward, but I personally don’t care HOW much money I make, the idea of 40 or 50 years of straight labor, even enjoyable, rewarding labor, does not match with my definition of success. Also, most of his examples are the sort of fantastically successful people who, frankly, aren’t very creative. His recipes for success do not seem to cover creativity. (Because, frankly, very creative people are rarely very monetarily successful people. The monetarily successful make minor modifications on something that someone creative came up with, then sell it to millions.)
When read in conjunction with “Grown up Digital” and “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas”, this book has the power to inspire truly game-changing reform in our world.
You can set up a wordpress “email” and as you post elsewhere, send to wordpress that than post onto your blog
I”m thinking more along the lines of a sidebar widget, like the twitter feed or the current music.