Book Review: Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (Non- Fiction)

Outlier (n): A deviation from mean. This is the definition from managerial statistics class but in the book the population is the human population and these outliers are outperformers, “geniuses”, and successful people. This book looks at the factors that contribute to high levels of success. The author claims that the successful people or the so called geniuses are just normal people with talent but there are various factors that contribute to their successes. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. For this 10,000 hour rule he gives examples of the Beatles, Beethoven, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many other personalities and trust me this does make sense. I along with a friend even proved this theory on the cafeteria table by examining Sachin Tendulkar. He started seriously practicing for 12 hours daily at the age of 12 and at the age of 15 he made the legendary 664 runs partnership with Kambli. So calculating for 3 years and 12 hours daily we get a figure of 10,000+ hours. So he achieved great success only after giving in 10,000+ hours in practice. In short, this book could be termed as a book about how to achieve success as it can explain almost every success story by its theories.

Independence

This one is from my FB notes.

My first note on independence day, guess this is azaadi from "no notes in fb".

I guess every year on independence day we have the same question "are we really free??"

I always hate such questions so here goes the reason for that.

For a country which was said to disintegrate within a decade by "experts" and was said to have a civil war in its first decade of independence, we have come a long way. 63 years for a country with a great diversity where the tastes in food vary every 50 kms and the dialect changes almost every 100 kms is not a joke. Its a literal color chart from Kashmir to Kanyakumari (well it should be Indira point which is the southernmost point but K and K rhyme :P).For a country growing in great numbers there can be a few skirmishes here and there after all we dont exist in an Ideal state. We talk about the suffering on the poor people on fb and blogger and blame the state for it but have we ever given a thought to doing something about it? Talking about riots, where dont they take place. all we can do is try to stop them and if the government tries to do this then it is termed as government atrocities.

The independence day is not for us to blame the government on its shortfalls and wrongdoings, its for us to honor the men and women who laid down their lives for us to be free.

ets look at other countries who attained freedom at the same time.

Pakistan- need i say anything about them. they cancelled their celebrations because of the massive flooding in the whole country.They got divided again in '71

Sri lanka - they just had a civil war

The progress we attained was not expected from us but we did it.

So instead of cursing the government we should respect our freedom and the people who fought for it and also those who ensured that we stayed together as a country.

Are we Free?? Yes we are. The PM just said that the Media and Securities are the two pillars of freedom and where there is unbiased media there is freedom.

Connections

Four years, don’t know how they just flew by. Every time I read the word alumni, I told myself it must be a 40 year old greying (in my case soon to be balding) man telling his kids about the college he went to. But here I am 21 years old and have to call myself an alumnus sharing a learning I got in VNIT.

Who would have thought that so much could be given by a technological institute to a lanky Punjabi from Gujarat? 4 letters are responsible for changing my whole thinking pattern – VNIT.

Before coming to college, I just knew a handful of middle class school kids from Baroda and some cousins in North India. But VNIT expanded this whole horizon of connections. Now I know at least one person from every part of the country be it the North-east or the Andaman & Nicobar Islands. There are different people with different thinking patterns and working patterns and to understand all this is very difficult. It is an on-going process, but in VNIT I got a first-hand experience of dealing with different people. It’s just like the HSBC advertisement, Different Latitudes, Different People, One Bank. I’d say Different People, Different Languages, Different Colours, and One Connection – VNIT. An experience highlighting this point was when an Assamese friend from the Western Part of India posted on Facebook just when the vacations were ending “Now going to taste the food from all parts of India.” Apart from the placement the college provides, there are 3 intangibles that the college does provide. They are Friends, Knowledge and Experience. The experiencing of these differences of opinion, thinking, working, food preferences, songs, movies makes us tolerant and understanding of our diverse nation as a whole broadening our horizon as Paulo Coelho would put it. People write books on these differences in our nation, but I believe the best authors of such books could come from within our very own college. So lets just not look at VNIT as a college for providing technical expertise but also a provider of knowledge about the people of India

PS – I was writing this article while listening to a Telegu song, chatting with a friend in Jammu and flooding a friend’s e-mail asking him to send some of his home-made Manipuri pickle while sitting in Goa.