But, what about the outside environment? Did they rely on something on their way to success? Had things like birthplace, ethnic, family, decade, or even birthdate ever affected them? These are what Malcolm Gladwell focus on in his book Outliers. Subtitled The Story of Success, the author try to show us that such thing can do affect us, say, a lot, on our way to success.

Consider this example, hockey players are nationally respected in Canada. There is an “all-star” team for each age of players. Make a list showing basic information about those players in the “all-star” team, and a strange thing appears(but maybe you don’t notice it), that is most of these players are born in January, February, March. Just coincidence? No! Let’s go over the birthdate of those great players, and players of the “all-star” teams in the history, we will actually find the same thing. Then comes WHY? Why players born in the first three months have such a big advantage over others? That is, believe it or not, because the date that separate two groups of players is January, 1st, so these born-older-players have more time to practice, so they gain more experience, so they can stand out against those same-level players. In conclusion, birthdate is their advantage by birth.

Next, the 10,000-hour rule, which says that if you want to become a world-class expert in any area, you must have been learning, practicing, reading, or teaching for at least 10,000 hours. Mozart didn’t disobey this rule, nor did Bill Gates, nor did the Beatles. But there obviously exist many other people that practiced tens of thousands of hours, but none of them are as successful as Bill Gates or the Beatles. Are their success only the result of their “genius”? No, both of them met a sequence of fortunate opportunities, and they held them all, and they success. For Bill Gates, his family is rich enough, his middle school is good enough to own a time-sharing terminal on which he can practice programming, he was given continuous terminals to practice advanced programming skills, he met essential friends like Paul Allen, he left collage at the right time when PC is stepping into more and more families. And finally, he succeed, greatly. For the Beatles, they were offered a chance to play in Hamburg, Germany, at that time they were not so famous, and they had to play rock and roll eight hours a night, seven days a week, but they didn’t give up. Just like Gladwell wrote:

“They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman went on. “They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers–cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”

These are only the first two chapters of this outstanding book Outliers and they really refreshed my mind, my belief on why one success.

They success, because of their great luck, they are outliers, but when consider every chance given to them separately, there is nothing special, they do normally, so they are not outliers at all!

Somewhat confused? But what I want to tell you is that Everyone Is A Miracle, we all have this or that opportunities(maybe not all of them lead to success), we are unique because no one would experience exactly the same as us, there’s no way to “chase after” success, but there’re many ways to hold every chance you’re given.

Everyone is a miracle.
Everyone is somewhat, an Outlier.

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!

So what Outliers means exactly? The author showed us the answer in the Introduction:

1: something that is situated away from or classed different from a main or related body.
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

Subtitled “The Story of Success”, the author Malcolm Gladwell

argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how and why some people thrive, we should look around them — at things like their family, their birthplace, even their birth date.

In Chapter 1, which titled The Matthew Effect, Gladwell shows how much “all-star” hockey players are influenced by their birth date.

In Chapter 2, which titled The 10,000-Hour Rule, he argues that if you want to be a world-class expert in any field, you MUST spend AT LEAST 10,000 HOURS(about ten years or so) in training yourself. This is true from Mozzart to the Beatles to Bill Gates.

In Chapter 3 and 4, which titled The Trouble With Geniuses(Part 1, Part 2), with the comparition between Chris Langan(a high-IQ man who is ignored by almost everyone) and Robert Oppenheimer(the physical theorist who directed the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic-bomb), he explains why high-IQ doesn’t always produce Nobel Prizer winner or something like that.

Continue reading.

But getting more deeply involved in China posed problems too.The country was ruled by a sprawling Communist bureaucracy that actively monitored, restricted, and censored the Internet. Doing business there ran in the face of the founders’ core principles of providing free, unfettered access to information. Since 2000, the company’s approach had been to provide unfiltered Chinese-language search results that users anywhere in the world could access through Google.com. Because Google operated this site outside of China’s borders, the government had no say in what could or could not be displayed. The catch was that within China, certain links from Google were blocked–though users were able to see the nature of the information the government was prohibiting access to. The blacklist consisted largely of pornographic and political Web sites, particularly those dealing with human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square uprising. Blocking was done by a massive set of sophisticated government-run filters–dubbed “the Great Firewall of China”–that often slowed the Web traffic passing through it.

I wonder whether the Chinese edition of The Google Story still contains these things or not.
I think it doesn’t.

So, this is the fact,
the fact we are facing in this country.

Start new reading plan: Outliers.
Which I couldn’t guess how much time will I spend on it….

Just as the title said, I’m now reading The Google Story(Updated Edition For Google’s 10th Birthday).Now the process is page 67.
This is a book telling the story about Sergery Brin and Larry Page-the two founders of Google-and Google the search engine.
It’s really an exciting story.
And I also know that what ‘PageRank’ stands for is not a ranking algorithm for web pages but Larry Page’s Ranking System…

Nice book,nice history.
As a google fans,
I gonna read this book now~

P.S.
I bought this one from Amazon.cn, there are many English book online for shopping on it, try it if you’re in China.