Obviously, I have no idea what book or magazine you are reading. However, aside from what it may be, I am absolutely certain that you are currently reading my blog.
And yet, I almost guess, this makes me feel guilty, for there is so much more and better to do with your time. Of all there is to read in the world, and you on this screen? Jmmmm… I don’t know… Maybe the guilty one is you! Don’t you think?
Just in case, in any case, let me recommend you a book just out of the oven: Outliers. It is written by one of the most influential authors of recent times, Malcolm Gladwell, who after The Tipping Point and Blink, gives us a new piece of thought and wisdom that you can’t leave without injecting into your brain, your thinking, your reasons (…I think).
Let me copy paste what his own website says in response to this question:
What do you want people to take away from Outliers?
I
think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point.
Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little bit
differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader
understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get
people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish
with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group
project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just
because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots
of different people and lots of different circumstances- and that means
that we, as a society, have more control over who succeeds-and how many of us succeed-than we think
many of us succeed-than we think. That’s an amazingly hopeful and
uplifting idea.
But well, and for those who don’t know the word, in the author’s own version, what is an Outlier?
“Outlier”
is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside
normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be
somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in
the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That
day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of
why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less
about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book
I’m interested in people who are outliers-in men and women who, for one
reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary
outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of
us as a cold day in August.
In Costa Rica we live too much influenced by the idea of being equal. Possibly this explains the serrucha pisos or the choteador, because in the absence of arguments, when someone stands out, popular resources that propose to equalize quickly appear.
This book, Outliers, therefore, deals with a counter-cultural theme in our country, it concentrates on explaining success and discovers it in many external factors, in others of the environment and certainly in what Gladwell calls luck, although I have a direct conflict with that last concept.
