1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  2. Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh
  3. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  4. Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  7. Uniformity With God’s Will By Saint Alphonsus de Liguori
  8. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  9. Daring Greatly by Brene Brown
  10. They Call Me Coach by John Wooden
  11. The Winner Within by Pat Riley
  12. In My Own Words by Mother Teresa
  13. The World According to Mister Rogers by Fred Rogers
  14. “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman!” by Richard P. Feynman
  15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  16. Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
  17. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  18. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Patterson
  19. My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George
  20. Four Miles to Pinecone by Jon Hassler
  21. Runaway Ralph by Beverly Cleary
  22. Skinnybones by Barbara Park
  23. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
  24. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
  25. At Home by Bill Bryson
  26. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  27. Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes
  28. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
  29. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  30. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  31. Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson
  32. Shane by Jack Schaefer
  33. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
  34. Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman
  35. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success

 

by Malcolm Gladwell

I have read much of what Malcolm Gladwell has written. I’ve read every one of his New Yorker articles. I’ve read The Tipping Point, Blink, David & Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, which disappointingly for someone who has read every one of Gladwell’s New Yorker articles, is a collection of Gladwell’s New Yorker articles. I have listened to speeches and interviews with Gladwell that I’ve been able to dig up online. I’ve even begun listening to his podcast– Revisionist History.

Gladwell has a unique gift of taking gobs and gobs of research, making connections that are seemingly disparate at first glance, and telling a compelling story to make accessible connections for his readers. 

While Blink was the first book I read by Gladwell, The Tipping Point (and the 10,000 Hour Rule that is discussed) is probably the book of his that has stuck with me the most, although at some point all of his writing tends to blend together anyway. The point is, I guess, you can’t go wrong with Malcolm Gladwell’s books.

 

“In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

 

“If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

 

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

“Achievement is talent plus preparation”

“I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing….It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”
“It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”
“Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”
“Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.”

“Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”
“The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
Sticky Books are those that you just can’t get out of your head. They stick with you long after you have put the book down and have moved on to something else. These are some of my Sticky Books. I don’t enjoy reviewing books myself. I find I am either full of far too much praise for the book because I know how difficult it can be to write a book, or I am far too negative about a book because, well, I guess I was just in a bad mood. So instead of reviews, I have pulled some of my favorite quotes from each Sticky Book.

 

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