Reddit reviews Outliers: The Story of Success

For anyone interested there's a fantastic book about exactly this topic of luck in success called Outliers: The Story of Success - By Malcom Gladwell. I highly recommend it.

I would argue that any business which properly values its employees will vastly outperform its competition in the long-term. It results in a very different approach to business, which creates higher productivity.

The problem is that this requires a much more rational understanding of success and what leads to it. Work by the likes of Malcolm Gladwell and Nassim Taleb has done a lot to move our understanding forward in this area. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a fun and interesting entry to the topic.

We saw a similar problem in the maximum pay discussions recently, there is a large disconnect in society from the reality. Despite investors struggling to combat excessive pay, due to its links to bad performance, for decades.

(note: There is also a further long-term issue with your proposed strategy. It creates an ever growing pressure to reduce pay to compete. Over a very long time period this will create significant problems for society, by reducing government income. You can see the same error in the governments proposals to significantly reduce taxes.)

(edit: Someone down voted you for asking a question? So you get an up vote from me!)

To look further I think we would need to consider what a genius is. Is it an altered brain structure (thinking of things like synesthesia or how regions can be different sizes), is it a huge early advantage gained from quickly orientating your ideas correctly, or something else? The book Outliers is related to this. Usually I reserve the word genius for the likes of Bach and Einstein who may have had something physically different about their brains.

I am going to apologise in advance if this sounds unclear but this is me trying to articulate a world view I have developed over years of contemplating the existence of mankind and reading volumes of what others have concluded (this, this and this among others)

Before societies and civilisations were formed, groups existed by meeting the challenges of basic survival:

• If we do not collect enough food, we will die of hunger
  
• If we do not remain vigilant in our defences, we will eventually die from predators and attackers picking us off
  
• If we do not construct means of conflict resolution and resource distribution, we will die from killing each other
  
  Each of the above led to an exponential growth in all the areas of human development:
  
  
• hunting to secure more sources of food, cooking and curing to extend the life span of edible food.
  
  
• tools to augment the physical capabilities of humans (hunt and attack from a distance, or make clothing and housing),
  
  
• skills and arts to improve on the methods of the above
  
  
• oral written recording, social structures to better manage groups and train future generations in the collective knowledge
  
  Groups therefore developed systems and tools to more efficiently meet these challenges.
  
  The more these groups grew into societies and civilisations, the more efficient their methods of survival, the larger the distance between the group and these dangers.
  
  Societies reach a fork in the road where they have two choices:
  
  

1. Remain on the path of continuously improving their methods of survival. Improve their technology, defences, distribution mechanisms.
   
2. Settle into an equilibrium with their environment and focus inward on goals they previously could not entertain. This could include wealth, pleasure. It can also include spirituality, cultural or individual identity
   
   I have concluded from my years contemplating this cosmic riddle, that taking the second path which leads to an equilibrium generally leads to the society leaving it's survival capabilities to stagnate and atrophy. This might sound like I am saying the society is decaying but it's actually the opposite, they have reached such a status in terms of organisation and command of their environment that they can exist and thrive in a stable state almost indefinitely.
   
   That is, until they come into contact with a civilisation that remained on the hard road of honing the mechanisms of survival. Building on the fundamentals of survival (by that I mean tool building to production, skills to science, tribal councils to political machinery) do not lead to equilibrium, they lead to conflict yes but ultimately growth and strength.
   
   To sort of clarify:
   
   the native americans and their culture had a full command of their environment, they no longer feared nature and their fellow man posing an existential threat to them. As a result they diverted their attentions inwards, towards the meaning of nature, spirituality and identity. That was great when they were the only ones roaming the lands in full command of it. Unfortunately, having not built on their already solid base from 20,000 years of survival skills/mechanisms in the americas, they left themselves defenceless in the face of a civilisation that was forged in the fires of centuries of chaos, war, conquest and disease. Technology, politics and the art of war are not these monoliths that are thrust upon humanity. They are incremental advances over centuries by hard work, risk taking and sacrifice from millions of society's best and brightest. The fatal flaw that the native americans committed was that their best and brightest gradually turned away from working on the basics of survival and instead chose to focus on the metaphysical. The rich and beautiful culture they accumulated was useless as tools in the face of gunpowder, iron and germ warfare.
   
   ---
   
   How does this relate to the trends in western countries in relation to restructuring the systems of gender identity? I believe that it is a small thread in a grand tapestry of ideologies meant to create an artificial form of equilibrium, drawing the energies of its citizenry down a path diverting them from building on those tools/mechanisms based on the basics of survival and into the metaphysical/spiritual. The general consensus being that society has reached a peak that leaves them unchallenged by outsiders: the advances of previous generations in science, technology and military prowess have been perfected, are no longer a pressing matter for society at large.
   
   There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking an equilibrium or focusing on the metaphysical, it is the vector that society is set to follow, the vector veering away from the basics of survival, which is the danger.
   
   Hope that clarifies my initial reply.

Read this and then find something you want to spend 10,000 hours of your life on.

I would strongly recommend reading Outliers it is at the top of nearly all self taught MBA and generally learning about life reading lists and it sheds a lot of light on what you say.

Most importantly it is based on research.

My correction to your phrase would be:
>The only thing that separates the rich and the poor is that the rich work hard at the right thing and the poor work hard at the wrong thing.

NB - By wrong here I mean wrong to make you rich. I'm not passing judgement on what's right and wrong for a person. That is entirely subjective.