Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Copy - Kindle
Rating - 3/5

Around the globe, Malcom Gladwell is known as a foremost thought leader. The gift that the author has, apart from distinct ideas, is his flair for writing. This is the second book I read in recent weeks that this author wrote & you couldn’t help notice but a similar strategy that he follows- Taking a central idea & wrapping it around in layers of anecdotes that reinforces the central idea.  Here the author uses his now famous “The 10,000hrs rule”. The author puts forth his views that the outliers of this world – the Bill Gates & the Steve Jobs, the ones who made to the top of the Canadian ice hockey team & Europe’s football team et el had undergone more than 10,000hrs of training & educating themselves  in a particular skill.

                                                             

Apart from hard work, the author puts a lot of emphasis on the culture & environment that the test cases grew up in during those 10,000hrs. There is an interesting episode where he details the life of Chris Langan  reported to having an IQ of 190+. Chris has every bit of intelligence as Albert Einstein had but Chris did it not make it to the newspapers for winning the Noble Prize – he now takes care of a ranch in Missouri. The culture & the environment were not conducive for Chris to make the right decisions during his early life.  The passage where this is entailed is called Opportunity.
A similar set of ideas are put forth in the other half of the book called legacy. Here the author takes a view, what in economics is called a macroeconomic view, to reinforce the effect of culture & environment. His dissection of why Asians are good in Maths & why so many plans crashed in Korea in late 1990s makes a very interesting read.

Though the books binds you with the idea that the books brings forth, I couldn’t help notice at some places that the views were flimsy. There is no space of counter argument or an approach mentioned that delivers a different result. In short I felt it was an abridged version of Daneil Kahnmen’s book “ Too fast & too slow” ; it lacks the finer details that Kahnmen’s book provides.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Copy: Paperbound
Rating - 5

Bink is one of those rare books that will make you stop & connect with what the author just said to your personal incidents.  Malcolm Gladwell, one of the foremost thought leaders of our times, wings in a simple concept that we use every day – thin slicing. How do you react in the first two seconds when confronted with a situation or have to make a snap judgement? Early in the book the author introduces us to the part of the brain that leaps into conclusions called adaptive conclusion. The years of experiences in leading a life or pursuing a career helps us in hard-wiring certain aspects which leads to adaptive conclusion.

The author takes us through different cases where these aspects come into play – from a tennis coach who was very accurate in calling the double fault even before the ball hit the racket, to the fire-fighter who instantly knew something was wrong in one of incidents. The author weaves in a series of test cases where snap judgement works  & where it did not. The test cases exhibited in the book ranged from a car salesman in Florida to a head doctor in Chicago. The writing is such the reader will make several pit-stops to think & wonder about those blink situations.

The gold nuggets of the book are buried in the last chapters of the book. It will be unwise to tell it. What will be wise to tell is that reading the book was an experience.