Posts Tagged ‘Malcolm Gladwell’
Outliers Reviewed, What Did I Learn?
I have done plenty of math and realize it is going to take me a total of 10 years to be an expert at my writing, 8 more years left! I have been writing for the past couple of years, but haven’t put in the amount of time to warrant even 1000 hours per year. In a year it is 8,760 hours. We spend 20% sleeping, another 25% working in order to pay bills, 20% bullshitting around, 10-15% with family and friends, and leaves about 20% of doing whatever else one wants to do. 20% of time in a year is equivalent to 34 hours per week. That is like adding another full-time job without necessarily getting paid from it, so what are our priorities?
Thoughts After Reading Outliers
I didn’t want to think about what I thought of the book until this morning. I was thinking all of it was the 10k hours and finding opportunity wherever and whenever it came around. But it is more than that, it has to deal with my past, where I was raised, and the lucky breaks I got throughout my life. As I kept reading I started to understand the shape of the world and how the majority of us are fucked, just by coming out the womb of a mother whose background warranted failure. The mother and probably the father were going to do what they were taught and through their life experience help their children with living a life of the past.
Tags: Book Review, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, Success
Outliers, Taking my Passion to a New Destination With a Little Twist
I push the snooze button, yet for another time. It is now 6 a.m. and know it takes 40 or so minutes to get to work and still smell like shit. But, all I’m going to do is sit in my cubicle and look at my computer screen. So, I skip the shower, wash my face, brush my teeth, put on my wrinkle as can be collar shirt I wore last week and to the club (which still smells like smoke), and run out of the door to my car. I hop on the beltway and quickly realize that I have gotten on a paying road, where I am setting in traffic. I finally make it to work, as I get out my car I think to myself, “Should I take the stairs? They wouldn’t know exactly what time I got in? I should talk to a couple of friends so it looks like I have been here for quite sometime”.
I finally arrive inside my office and my boss gets on me for being late and said he will need this and that for a presentation later in the morning. I get started and complete the work, not caring one bit. I make it to lunch and decide to sit in my car. I sat there in the car (no a/c, started transforming the car into a race car) and thought. I thought about what I have been up to in my life. I thought I was a failure, and thought ‘is this it?’ Damn, I was having a quarter life crisis 2 years before the actual time and didn’t even realize it.
When I started to examine my life, I knew something was missing, I knew I had to do more for myself. I was an expert in the automobile field, but didn’t want to be that guy that could only talk about cars and didn’t care or relate to other topics that were important to people. I knew I sorta liked reading and eventually would read whatever I could, but knew this was a slow process. I didn’t want to continue to watch television and relate to people for 5 minutes on a show that wasted 30 minutes-1 hour of my life. So, I started to listen to podcast and to stretched my net as far as I could: while at work I listened to politics, audio-books, everyday life, current events, pop culture, social media, technology, business, and whatever else.
Tags: experiment, Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, passion, reading
- @YEAdamMcFarland The full screen editor are badass, I get plenty done, but there shouldn't be a reason for so many choices. 12:37:20 PM November 13, 2009
