“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich”. This made me think in detail about all what I know about the Indian culture and where we are now. Above Chinese proverb I read in Outliers – The STORY of SUCCESS by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell done a great job of de-linking the success from personal glory to the practical question of where they come from and what culture they belong to and how they spend their time.
The story start with analysis of Canadian hockey team and the importance of team selection cut-off date in Canada, Outliers has a pretty neat study and the related facts about it and by the time that chapter is over you will start believing what described in Outliers is making sense, that make you read it complete. He analyze the life of Bill gates and few others from IT and Beatles the facts presented conclude to the point that there is a magical number of 10,000 hours of training which will make you a master in particular subject.
From there it goes to analyze the cultural differences and how people behave to a particular situation based on the culture he had grown. Rice farming and Wheat farming (all other agriculture in Europe/USA) is analyzed in quiet detail to portrait this cultural difference, what I liked most in this is the big (looks SMALL for us) thing we always miss out while analyzing the facts. Gladwell first get into the difference between wheat and rice farming where rice farming in Asia never had the salve system, but wheat and other farming followed the slavery. The logic is very simple rice need more attention and the more you care the better the results are, this directly influenced the characteristics of Asian generation.
In the beginning of Outliers Gladwell state “people won’t rise from nothing, we do owe something to the parentage and patronage” and he definitely driven the point home. A great read for all.
