Finally I bought my own copy of the Gladwell book - Outliers! I just waited endlessly for the paperback and a discount(both together). Blink had made me cautious! Just managed to read some 3 chapters in a moving car! As with the Tipping Point,interesting observations replete with loads of stories, often repetitive to perhaps make the book fat enough for 200 pages:-)
I loved the point(in hindsight quite obvious) that he makes about the highly successful guy in any category investing in about 10,000 hours of practice compared to the not-so-successful(but equally talented) guy putting in half the number of hours...
Picked up a few quotes from the net which Gladwell Saheb has made:
1. The closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play!
2. When I wrote Tipping Point, my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it ... I had no notion I was creating a kind of public document. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put the podium to waste.
3. At the end of the day, I'm just a journalist. I spend my time talking to people who tell me things, and then I write them down. I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.
4. People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience."
And a lot of the experts are theory rich and experience poor:-)
5. No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.
Well am 1 month into it(rising around dawn). Feeling rich a little...am I?
6. Hitchcock began making his best movies in his late 50s. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and many others did their best work very late in life. Sometimes success isn’t recognized until late in life. That’s not uncommon.
Javed Akhtar, Gulzar Saheb too!!
7. Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google!!
So true...okay will leave it at that!
2 comments:
A while back I picked up Blink! only because it was talked about so much. I think a few pages into the book I gave up. And then tried once more. A total bonker the book was.
But yet outliers gets me interested to read it. Will surely give it a try!
agree, blink was a total washout..
many of the authors try to capitalise on their first best-seller( pushed by publishers) and then the output is often quite ordinary!
But do check gladwell posts and interviews. i often find it more useful and economical to browse through their thoughts in the online space ...
how have you been?
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