Outliers. I'd say, Identifying Ingredients of Success

It's been like a month since i finished reading this book, and couldn't come with an original satisfactory idea about it since now. The first post impression is that it's a success recipe book, that tell you how to fix your life, and persuades you that you actually can, but that approach is completely wrong.

Let's try a quick exercises to try to reproduce what Outliers does... Think in a sweet apple pie in your preferred crust type. At the perfect temperature and with the perfect smell, it hasn't been long since it was baked. Nobody can say that this is not a success, but what was the recipe, or more specific, the key ingredients in that success?

Well, we used apples... but there's a citric flavor there, it was green apples... it doesn't matter how perfect the apples were, but were green ones... same with every other ingredient, it just need to be good enough to fit in the recipe's needing. But when baking, that's other story... you need the perfect temperature to control humidity, ripeness of the fruit and crunchiness. Also you need the right time to take the flavor out of the cinnamon and other spices, and so on.

What I'm trying to say here, is that every success story had a recipe behind, but the success itself doesn't come from the recipe itself, but from the conditions that made that recipe a winner. This paradigm shift is what Malcom Gladwell is trying to do here with several real life examples, showing you what ingredients were important into certain degree (they needed to be present but only above a certain level), and what ingredientes were ky to the success.

At the end, one comes with the conclusion that being extremely skilled or intelligent, or tall or whatever is not as important as being at the right place, in the right time and with the right recipe, and be able to take advantage of the situation... some people will never have such opportunity, but you need your arsenal of skills ready every time to shoot when you spot that very unique opportunity.

Definitely a must read that make you change the way you see the life. Sepcially tailored for those who (like the former me) think that they can do everything with just proposing it and no mountain is too high to be climbed... that's certainly true, but nobody will climb it alone.

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Eduardo Avaria
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