I finished reading "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell at work yesterday, while waiting to start the day with a lecture.
Overall, I liked the book. It gave me a lot of insight on how to raise my kids to be "successful." It somewhat seemed like it was too late to practice some of these for myself, but there's still many good lessons learned.
1. In order to get good at something, we need to continually persist, no matter how often we fail or succeed. That's pretty obvious, but there's no short-cut. We need to just continue to work at it and perfect it. I forget the examples, but for some reason, Chinese people and rice farming comes to mind. Another thing is 10,000 hours to become brilliant at something. He gave the example of Bill Gates and the Beatles and how they cranked out 10,000 hours at programming and playing music, respectively, prior to their popularity, which is about 8 hours a day, every day for 3.5 years. Or, if it's 8 hours per weekday, that'd be ~4.7 years.
2. Kids that fully utilize summer vacation to do nothing fall behind those that continue education throughout the summer (usually strictly encouraged by parents, generally parents that have time and/or money to pay attention to their kids).
3. Little advantages in education gradually adds up. So start now, work little by little and keep at it. Persistence will bring you far.
(I'll have to flip through it again to see if there were other things)
Funny thing is that I was reading an article somewhere (I think it was a blog on MIT TR), but it mentioned how Gladwell was known for being very ambitious in defining causations.
