"Outliers" (Thomas Sowell)

had a conversation with a 13 year old boy. He was telling me how his older brother (16), had just dropped out of school to get a job.

My brother-in-law dropped out of tenth grade - but not to get a job but to go to work for his father's business. His father warned him, "you'll never wear a white shirt," and he agreed and still wanted to do it.
In his case that functioned as an incentive, much like emigrating to a different country does. He had an internal need to succeed - and so, he did.

“...outliers—are not simply a matter of personal merit but come out of a background of special circumstances that enable outstanding individual ability to lead to performances far beyond the norm.”

Everyone has many people to thank for paving their road of success. Outliers wouldn’t be outliers, though, if they were lazy and thumbed their nose at their heritage.

I finished reading the book and found it very interesting. I think I was most impressed with the ‘10,000 hour rule’ - that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice or doing something to become expert at it.

But there is something else at play beyond the mere number of hours. You have to have parents that support you while you pursue your interest. Generally, you can’t work, so you have to parents who can financially as well as emotionally support you. You pretty much have to do your thing to the exclusion of many other things. The successful people in these studies were not just innately good at what they do, even if it looks effortless, they worked at it for years - which is probably something most of us knew, but it was interesting to see that studies have shown how many hours it takes!

The book’s chapters can be read independently and I immediately gravitated to one about ethnicity and airplane pilots. Using Korean Airlines (previously crash-ridden) as the primary example, it turns out that the way your culture allows you to speak to superiors can determine whether you cand say directly, ‘We’ve got a problem’ or whether you say indirectly ‘Sir, do you think you should look at the altimeter?’ After a series of accidents, Korean Air brought in an American to help their pilots understand how they had to speak to each other to avoid crashes that often occurred because co-pilots couldn’t speak their minds to the pilot. Since then, Korean Air has had a much better safety record.

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