by Malcolm Gladwell.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book packed with interesting and unusual information
After reading several biographies, each about 900 pages long, it was a relief to read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, which contains 285 pages of text. Despite its relatively short length, it is a book packed with interesting and unusual information.
The book is subtitled “The Story of Success”. The thesis is that a person does not achieve success by his or her own abilities, intellect or performance alone, although the 10,000-hour rule is applicable to achieve proficiency in any field. Other important contributors include the time of birth, the growing-up environment, cultural background, and, yes, luck. Most of us are aware of some, if not all, of these influencing factors. What Malcolm Gladwell did in “Outliers” was to tell the stories of how these factors played in the successes of a number of household names such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Robert Oppenheimer, as well as less well-known names such as Bill Joy and Joe Flom. He concludes with the story of his own family, telling the reader that her mother, Joyce Gladwell, owes her college education to a series of lucky events. On the other side of the coin, he also told the story of Christopher Langan, whose IQ is similar to Albert Einstein and is regarded by many as well as by himself, as the smartest man in the world. “In his early years, while working as a farmhand, he started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. At sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s famously abstruse masterpiece "Principia Mathematica.” Yet Langan has yet to achieve any impact in the world because he did not have any support when he grew up. He is said to have written a manuscript entitled “Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)“, in which he proves the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics. He could not find a publisher of a scientific journal for CTMU because the fact that he had only a year and a half of college worked against him. This is surprising, as I would imagine that the whole human race will be dying to learn his solution of the puzzle (whether God and after life exist) which has, since time immemorial, escaped the best scientific, philosophic, and religious minds.
To drive home the importance of cultural legacy, Gladwell presented a fascinating ethnic theory of plane crashes which should be of interest to folks who take to the sky frequently. There is also an interesting theory of why Asian students did well in mathematics compared to American students. Related to this is the way of expressing numbers and fractions in Chinese versus in English and why the former (Cantonese in particular) is superior.
In conclusion, a highly entertaining and informative book.
CTMU by Chrisopher Langan, in which he proved the existence of God by Mathematics
(Source: Wikipedia)
Bill Joy at Economic Forum Davis Switzerland, 2003-01 (Source: Wikipedia)
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