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Casino
03-15-2011, 01:56 PM
I just recieved a copy of OUTLIERS wriiten by Malcom Gladwell.

Outliers: The Story of Success is a non-fiction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fiction) book written by Malcolm Gladwell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Gladwell) and published by Little, Brown and Company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little,_Brown_and_Company) on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_hockey) players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft) co-founder Bill Gates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates) achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan) and J. Robert Oppenheimer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer), end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

Sh%t i have spend alot more then 10,000 hrs in handicapping races and i still dont know what im doing.

Has anyone read this book?

Dave Schwartz
03-15-2011, 02:04 PM
Sure. I enjoy his books but the underlying theme seems to be that the winners he speaks about had the deck stacked in their favor.

There are other winners.

Personally, I like Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics better.

DJofSD
03-15-2011, 02:34 PM
It's an interesting read, to say the least.

10,000 is the theshold to competence.

Next, "What the Dog Saw."

GameTheory
03-15-2011, 03:51 PM
Gladwell sounds interesting but he really does shoddy research -- he just latches onto ideas he likes and decides that's that. You can poke major holes in most of his essays with minimal research...

Dave Schwartz
03-15-2011, 04:15 PM
Was it Outliers or Super Freakonomics that addressed the month-of-year bias in sports?

Spiderman
03-15-2011, 06:32 PM
"Blink" by Gladwell is a good read about making decisions, "in-the-blink of an eye." Something that horseplayers do.