love, read, write

As you can tell by the sidebar, I am currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It's an extremely interesting book, and it's a shame I don't have so much time on my hands to just sit down and read it in one sitting. (Unless I want to give up some sleep. But at this point in the year, sleep is gold.)
Outliers is a non-fiction book debunking the myths about success. Actually, not really debunking myths, but rather clarifying some simple and innocent misconceptions a great majority of the public seems to have.

We're always taught that working hard will get us to success. A little bit of talent, yes, but working hard is the key. After all, if we just have talent, we can't improve on it or do anything without effort. Ef-fort.
What Gladwell does is splash some ice water on our faces and shakes us by the shoulders. No. Life does not work so simply. If anybody could succeed by hard work, by golly--there'd be a lot more people in the magazines and newspapers. (Did I really just say by golly. Let's pretend you didn't read that.)
(I kind of felt like it was appropriate, though.)
(...never mind.)
And it's true. Once you read Outliers, which I am in the process of doing, you realize there's so much more to success than just talent and hard work. No. It's a multitude of variables, and those variables are actually very surprising. It's not just your environment or your family, but what month you're born in, what year you're born in, where you live, and other crazy variables you'd think were just trivial attributes.

Outliers also has lots of snippets of "success stories," digging deeper into the ground and uncovering some mysterious reasons as to why these stories did become indeed success stories. As in, what is the real reason why Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs? Why are most Olympics hockey players in Canada born in January?

Honestly, it seems like a book for ambitious people who want to succeed by reading a book along the lines of "How to Succeed: A Guide to Ruling the World" or of the like, but this is in reality an extremely intriguing psychology book. And trust me, psychology is pretty interesting. It's us we're studying. The tiny cells in our own heads.

...and that was my Midway Check on Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (more like a quarterly check). I'm glad I was able to post this week.

Happy Reading!