I feel pleased finished reading this fantastic book.
Spent 2 days on it, I’ve learned many fresh ideas on the way I understand success(or more exactly, what lead to success).
Everything we have learned in Ourliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks. They were born at the right time with the right parents takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.
And in the Epilogue titled A Jamaican Sroty Gladwell writes :
They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are.
The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.
Just bought The Tipping Point and two other books(Chinese Edition, The Island, and Combination Mathematics) on Amazon.cn.
My next target is Blink.
Go, go, GO!
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