The Outlier Effect And Your Success

Do you find yourself getting melancholy this time of year? It’s not unusual, especially once the hoopla of the holidays starts to wane and things slow to a crawl. You start to think about what’s worked out for you this year and everything that hasn’t. Then you pick up a magazine or see a story about some hotshot that’s zoomed out of nowhere to stunning success. I guess some people have what it takes and other’s don’t. Or do they?

The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell bursts the bubble on the mystique of what makes a winner. If you think that they win and you don’t because they’re blessed with an unusually high IQ or exceptional innate talent, you’ll come away with a different view once you’ve read this text. Gladwell’s research rips the veneer off all those success stories that make you more depressed than inspired. You know the ones. There’s a guy who comes up with a bright idea. He puts some effort into it and... Voila! ... enjoys a life of fame and fortune. You can insert “miracle occurs here” for the Voila! moment.

I’ve seen these profiles on TV and always wondered what really happened. Every one of us has good ideas, works hard at least when we’re inspired, and has enjoyed a touch of success. What makes everything go click for some people while it seems to fizzle out for the rest of us?

Outliers are exceptional people. They’re the exceptions, not the rules. We read about them, watch their smiling faces being interviewed on TV and are constantly being told how special they are and how much they have because of it. They must be special. You obviously have to be born with exceptional talent, a genius IQ, a superhuman drive for success or some other quality that will lift you to the top despite adversity or humble beginnings.

Rubbish! That’s what Gladwell says. When you look deeper into the lives of the outliers, what you find is somewhat ordinary people who were born at just the right time to do what they became famous at and/or were given some exceptional privileges at a tender age. Many pioneers of the personal computer revolution needed to be born around 1955 to be the right age to pioneer it. Any earlier and they would have graduated college and been caught up in a Fortune 500 career ladder. Any later and they would not have had the skill set or experience to participate. Take note that Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim were all born between 1953 and 1955.

Another key factor is the what Gladwell calls the 10,000 hour rule. You need 10,000 hours of practice to be a competent practitioner. Even those rising stars that seem to be propelled by native ability alone got their 10,000 hours in somehow. The Beatles got theirs playing 8 hour gigs in Hamburg long before they materialized on the Ed Sullivan Show. Bill Gates got his beginning at a private school that offered something no public school had at the time -- a computer terminal for students with time sharing on a mainframe in Seattle.

Yes, it does make a difference to be born into families of means versus struggling with crushing poverty or modestly getting by. Having someone of wealth, influence, education, talent or success to mentor you during those early years of interest can supercharge your development. That doesn’t mean every privileged child achieves super success. Some just don’t have the ambition or smarts to be more than mediocre.

Bill Gates wasn’t handed success, but he was enabled by being born at the right time to the right circumstances. He still had to take the ball and run, as they say. There were plenty of other youngsters coming of age at the same time from similar backgrounds that you’ll never hear of.

Some may read this book and find confirmation of their conviction that they haven’t achieved enough and won’t ever because they didn’t get the advantages that accident of birth awarded others. But I actually found this to be a very hopeful and empowering book. It blows away the mystique of “and then a miracle occurs” and basically says that you’ve got what it takes if you want to make a go of it. By understanding the lucky breaks that have boosted others, you may be able to identify what you’ve been missing and find a way to get or compensate for it later in life. The 10,000 hour rule? Hey, this is the first hour of the next 10,000 hours. What will you do to get the most out of them?

T1 Rex Is On The Kindle

Have you discovered the reading pleasure of electronic ink? Over 500,000 avid readers have made the jump from bound blocks of paper to the lightweight Amazon Kindle. Many are queuing up their orders for the larger Kindle DX due out this summer. Kindle is where reading is headed, and we're proud to be included in their blog catalog.

Yes, you'll still be able to read us on your computer any time you want. That's where we're created and hosted. But now you also have the option of subscribing to the Kindle edition of Telexplainer. Take your electronic reader to the beach, on vacation, to school or to work. Along with your extensive collection of novels, textbooks, tech references, and newspaper subscriptions, the latest updates of this blog will be delivered to you when they are published, in full text with illustrations.

Do you have your own Kindle yet? If not, you'll be interested to learn that this cutting edge device makes reading long passages of text much easier on the eyes than staring at a computer screen. The reason is that LCD backlight in every computer. It gives everything a nice glow, but the glare is hard on your eyes. You may already notice that you can't read as long online as you can with a good book. The eyestrain forces you to look away for awhile or quit altogether. Perhaps you resort to that old workaround of printing the documents you want to read. That solves the glare problem, but it can get pricey when you have volumes of text to print. There's also the matter of having to file and store all that paper documentation. It can be time consuming and not so green when it's time to clean the file cabinet.

The Amazon Kindle does away with all that trouble. Your documents are easy to read using the e-ink screen of the Kindle. There's no backlight to give you computer monitor eyestrain. Contrast is high and you can read from the Kindle easily in bright light as well as in your favorite easy chair. Storage is in the Kindle itself and online at Amazon. No need to shop for more bookshelves. You won't be needing them.

Delivery is fast and readily available, too. Kindle uses a cellular-based wireless delivery system called Whispernet. It's so fast that you can buy a book and start reading it minutes later. You don't need any wires, because the technology is built into the Kindle and doesn't require your computer to download books. Magazines, newspapers and blogs are delivered by Whispernet as soon as they are available. You don't have to worry about missing the latest installment because delivery is automatic.

The standard upgraded Amazon Kindle has a 6 inch diagonal black and white electronic ink digital display that shows up to 16 shades of gray. It holds up to 1,500 books. Delivery of new books is under 60 seconds. The Kindle is book size at 8" x 5.3" x a thin 0.36".

The larger Amazon Kindle DX measures a magazine size 10.4" x 7.2" x 0.38" and sports a 9.7 inch diagonal electronic ink display. It holds up to 3,500 of your favorite books and includes a native PDF reader for other documents.

By the way, there are now over 275,000 books available for the Kindles, including most New York Times Bestsellers. You'll also be able to subscriber to top newspapers, magazines and blogs, like T1 Rex's Business Telecom Explainer.

Taking a Read on the Amazon Kindle

The demise of paper has been prematurely predicted since computers were first introduced into offices. Indeed, we have learned to create, edit and share documents purely in the electronic realm. What wasn't seen was the huge increase in demand for paper created by millions of dot matrix, laser and ink jet printers. Newspapers are now online, but we still get paper copies delivered. E-books are readily available, but bookstore shelves are bursting with good old paper volumes. What is it about paper that just won't go away in the electronic age?

It could be that it's hard to curl up with a good e-book and its attendant PC. It could be that we like scribbling notes all over our disposable paper copies. A lot of it has to do with the fact that books, magazines and newspapers don't give you eyestrain the way reading on a backlit computer display does. It may also be that computers just don't fit well in the bottom of a bird cage.

Amazon believes it has solved all but the last issue. Polly will still get to do her duty on that impossibly frustrating Sudoku in the comics section. But the rest of us may begin to change our reading habits with the introduction of the Amazon Kindle. Others have tried and failed to build stand alone portable document readers. The problems had to do with size, weight, short battery life, low storage capacity, and the infamous eye-straining display. Kindle's design has worked through all of these issues, plus a few others.

The idea behind Kindle is that it looks, feels and weighs-in like a book. A trade paperback, mind you, not a romance novel. Even so, just 10.3 ounces for a 7.5" x 5.3" x 0.7" plastic device sure beats lugging a laptop. The most important feature of emulating a real book is the appearance of text on a page. That's where Kindle has advanced the game. The display has no backlight. It's an electronic paper display that uses a new technology to display black letters on a grayish white background. This isn't liquid crystals. It's ink particles controlled electronically. You can take it out and read in sunlight or under a lamp in the living room. It looks like paper and it doesn't get hot. Eyestrain? No problem. If you want a larger text, you can increase the font size. No need for special large print books.

The Kindle is designed to be held like a book with buttons on each side to advance a page or go back. There's also a QWERTY keyboard along the bottom to take notes or search for text, look up words in the dictionary, or shop for new books. Ah, that's another surprise feature. The Kindle comes with Sprint EV-DO cellular broadband to connect it to the Amazon bookstore and Web resources such as Wikipedia. Before you blanch at the thought of what that's going to cost, I should mention that Amazon picks up the tab on the broadband connection. You don't pay any fees. They expect to recover the cost of the service by making it easy to buy and download books, newspapers and magazines from wherever you happen to be. Think of it like a mobile iTunes for printed materials.

So how much will this portable reader set you back? It's priced at $399 and they've flown off the shelves so fast you have to get on a waiting list for the next shipment. For that you also get access to a download library of 90,000 books with best sellers and new releases prices at $9.99 each. The Kindle holds over 200 titles in memory. If you turn off the wireless between downloads, you can read for up to a week on a single battery charge.

Amazon's Kindle seems perfect for anyone who needs to tote around a bunch of heavy books. I'm thinking college students or those poor hunched over kids in middle and high school trudging home with their fifty pound backpacks. Technical professionals, too. How about the ease of studying for computer certifications or carrying your reference library in your jacket pocket? I did a quick search on "Cisco" in the Kindle bookstore and found 42 results including some popular study guides.