A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu

Outliers: The Story of Success by: Malcolm Gladwell
Copyright 2008 by Little, Brown, and Company
Price: $27.99 (Full disclosure: I read mine on Kindle and paid $9.99.)
Pages: 320

Malcolm Gladwell is at it again. The author of bestselling books The Tipping Point and Blink has just published Outliers: The Story of Success in which he discusses why outstanding people are outstanding. He explores why The Beatles and Bill Gates became so successful and others did not. Actually, once he explains the reasons behind success, it all seems very simple.

The Beatles were so outstanding because they put in their time. The time being over 10,000 hours, which is about right when it comes to doing something enough over and over again to be good at it; to be outstanding at it, to be an Outlier. As any well informed Beatle fan will tell you, before they became famous they had a long standing gig at a Hamburg, Germany strip club where they made their bones by playing eight hour shifts, seven days a week. Talk about practicing together. Gladwell argues that they spent more time playing together than any other group in the history of rock and roll. Over 10,000 hours or about ten years worth of experience crammed into just a couple of years. Combine that with some basic talent and ladies and gentlemen boys and girls...The Beatles!

Bill Gates' gateway to success can be traced back to his school days--when he was in school, computer time was at a premium, remember that? Very few computers were available to students; there were certainly no personal computers and so most people just did not get the opportunity to spend much time on them, or at least enough time to get proficient at programming them. Unless you went to Bill Gates' affluent private school where he had all the time he wanted on the school's computer. He also knew how to get things done. For instance, he would sneak out at night and head over to the UW computer lab and work on that computer for hours. Before he even got to high school, Gates had his 10,000 hours in. One thing led to another and we now have Microsoft and a very rich Bill Gates. Makes sense, doesn't it?

Gladwell also studies why 70% of all Canadian hockey players have their birthdays in the first part of the year. This one is not hard to figure out; it's because of the cut-off date for joining their first league when they were kids. The kids born in January, for example, were much older and bigger and more mature than the ones who were born in December and when you're six or seven years old, this is a big deal. Once you're in the league and you have all of these advantages you just get better and better. You get most of the attention and most of the coaching, while the guys eleven months younger than you just never seem to catch up. Simple answer, right?

Fascinating stuff this; but Malcolm Gladwell and fascinating stuff is what we have come to expect from him. Buy and read this book--you'll get a kick out of it.

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