Ladybug Podcast Book Club discussion

Outliers is Emma's book pick for the month of May! It's a book she's been wanting to read for eons upon eons of time and we're excited to chat with you all about it!

Make sure to leave your thoughts below so you can be featured in our book club episode!

Just ordered it! Excited to read.

I'm finished the first chapters and been loving it so far!

I'm almost halfway through and it is very interesting to see how things like when you were born matter so much into getting practice in what you're good at. I'm also impressed at the class differences and it is so true, even coming from a different place thank the US, you can tell how the most privileged people question things while the others just take whatever authorities say and don't believe that things will change. I hope to finish soon and add more to this topic.

I've finished it, and it was quite a good read. Eye-opening. The only thing is the 'example -> conclusion' structure, that also the famous Carnagie's book has, I find it quite repetitive.

I've finished it, these are my main thoughts:

First section:

I would have liked to have seen more evidence that the author hadn’t simply picked examples that back up his argument, I felt that it was a little one-sided in its consideration of examples that fit the theory, but maybe that was the type of book he intended to write. The argument he makes does add up though, but I don’t feel entirely confident about universal application.

The sections on deadlines and IQ vs creativity reinforced my belief that the conventional education system is broken and many of the institutional structures in professional life are not fit for purpose in the 21st Century. I think the skills required to do well on divergence tests are going to become more important, but that those systems and structures are all too often based around the convergence paradigm.

My main takeaway in terms of how we as readers of this book should seek our own success is that we need to identify where the opportunity is in the time and place we find ourselves, and seize it. What is today’s equivalent of being at Lakeside in 1968 or being an American entrepreneur in the 1830s?



Second section:

I was fascinated by the differences between words for numbers in English versus East Asian languages and how that gives East Asian children a natural leg-up in mathematics.

I’ve read quite a bit about the differences in how people communicate in different cultures, but it was really interesting to read of the practical application of this in the cockpit. My thinking did, however, go on one step further than the book – I was wondering what culture the designers of standard cockpit layouts and working practices came from, and whether it is just that the Korean culture has difficulties meshing with cockpit working practices, or whether the cockpit being designed in a culture very different from that of Korea could also be a factor?



General:

One thing that strikes me about the book is that it has a rather singular definition of success – getting to the top and/or being extremely rich. What if we all have our own definition of success? How would that change the story? I don’t feel the need to lead a huge company or become a multi-billionaire in order to achieve success (being a multi-billionaire might be nice, but I shan’t view myself as a failure if I don’t become one).

I was not a fan of this book. It took me quiet a while to read as I just felt it was rambling antecedents trying to form a hypothesis of how one has to be in the right place at the right time of the right race to be successful. This is not just a rich white success but in the epilogue you learn about the better success of light skinned Jamaicans.

If I was reading this Looking to find some answers on how to be successful I would be deeply disappointed. From my perspective it seemed a lot of it was just determined by your existential being. When, how, where you were born. The 10,000 hour thing is also loose in that if you do something wrong for all those amount of hours your a master of doing it wrong. Direction and leadership and appropriate education of the subject is a huge asterisk in the magical number to becoming a master of anything.