Outlier

There are a few books that I've read multiple times (non-fiction) that, because of content, I go back to. Outliers is one of them. Not that there's technical information that's so important it's worth revisiting, but because the stories behind what makes an "outlier" -- in the book's case, a person or people that are far above the norm -- are so unique and important to how we see our world and education.

Take for example, the famous Bill Gates and his fabled story. But closer analysis shows that it wasn't so much his intelligence that lead him to his initial success as it was opportunity and (get this) hard work.

Now when we say hard work, one often thinks of long hours and toil. But just how many hours constitutes hard work. In Outliers, you learn the magic number. It's 10,000 hours or over. 10,000 hours. Think about that. Take that number, divide it by 10 years. That's 1,000 hours per year, then divide by 365 and you're looking at appox 2.8 hours a day to work on something to become world class at it.

This is just one example of the many findings in Outliers. I'll be posting more later.