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My 2021 in Books
7 min readDec 26, 2021
- Farewell Waltz by Milan Kundera (5/5)
- Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky (4/5)
- Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (4/5)
- An outlier is something that doesn’t fit into normal expectation; something special, phenomenal, exceptionally successful.
- Main premise of the book: People who appear to have achieved extraordinary things are not successful because of some special individual actions/ merit on their part, but due to a series of circumstances and environments and cultural legacies that implicate us all. Success is a product of certain times and spaces. Systems of privileges and advantages (“lucky breaks”).
- Unfair advantage for those born near cut off date, e.g. disproportionate number of Jan babies in hockey teams. This effect is especially strong for sorting systems at a young age and the disparity is then compounded over the years as those placed in specialty teams receive additional resources and training.
- Generally, it takes 10000 hours of practice to be great at a skill, be it music, computing or sports. Opportunity comes if you’re born in the right generation eg software engineering in 1980s. You get enough opportunity to clock 10 thousand hours before the rise of a new sunrise field where you can succeed. Eg litigation in law or computer software engineering.
