john ndege

so i just finished reading gladwell’s new book - “outliers - the story of success”. i highly recommend it. in short its a book that tries to explain why people are successful. not in a cheesy personal development manner but in an academic sense. but that only part explains it, because its not a “academic journal” style of writing, its a new yorker style of writing. its intelligible and accessible.

so back to the book! gladwell concludes and i overwhemlingly agree that individual success is not individual at all but the result of whole collection of events, fortune and circumstance. however, what sets this book apart is not the argument, since it could hardly be called original but the fact that he uses data to back up his propositions. he looks at billionaires, rice farmers, pilots, inner city school children, lawyers and a whole raft of different people to get to what makes people successful. this is not an anecdotal self serving journal.

the chapter on cultural legacies is the best and its interesting to see how certain cultural legacies can affect different ethnicities today.

some people worry that the book may lead to disaffection as everything seems “determined”. on the contrary by appreciating some of the determining factors in life, one can be driven to change.

despite all this david brooks’ comments in the NYT article regarding the book rings true, that a precondition for success, irrespective of circumstance and luck is the belief “that the future can be better than the present, and I [the individual] have the power to make it so.”

but isn’t such thought processes overwhelmingly developed by our parents care? and is not true that what parents we get is a matter of luck? hmm, i will leave these questions for the philosophers.