Books 03 (Dec 09 - Dec 25)

[b0rderc0llie]

Am reading the book "Outliers : the story of success" by Malcolm Gladwell. One of my favourite books.

From http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

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Q&A with Malcolm

What is Outliers about?

1. What is an outlier?

"Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

2. Why did you write Outliers?

I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

3. In what way are our explanations of success "crude?"

That's a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don't lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we've been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that's the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.

4. Can you give some examples?

Sure. For example, one of the chapters looks at the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930's to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Now, you can call that a coincidence. Or you can ask—as I do—what is about being Jewish and being part of the generation born in the Depression and having parents who worked in the garment business that might have something to do with turning someone into a really, really successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a huge amount about why someone reaches the top of that profession by asking those questions.

5. Doesn't that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual's control?

I don't mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I'm not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there's a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

6. What's the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?

It's probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it's something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.

7. Wait. Does this mean that there are some airlines that I should avoid?

Yes. Although, as I point out in Outliers, by acknowledging the role that culture plays in piloting, some of the most unsafe airlines have actually begun to clean up their act.

8. In Tipping Point, you had an entire chapter on suicide. In Blink, you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting—and now plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?

Yes! I'm a frustrated thriller writer! But seriously, there's a good reason for that. I think that we learn more from extreme circumstances than anything else; disasters tell us something about the way we think and behave that we can't learn from ordinary life. That's the premise of Outliers. It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

9. How does this book compare to Blink and The Tipping Point?

It's different, in the sense that it's much more focused on people and their stories. The subtitle—"The Story of Success"—is supposed to signal that. A lot of the book is an attempt to describe the lives of successful people, but to tell their stories in a different way than we're used to. I have a chapter that deals, in part, with explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I'm not interested in anything that happened to him past the age of about 17. Or I have a chapter explaining why Asian schoolchildren are so good at math. But it's focused almost entirely on what the grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great grandparents of those schoolchildren did for a living. You'll meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.

10. What was your most memorable experience in researching Outliers?

There were so many! I'll never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who might be the smartest man in the world. I've never been able to feel someone's intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking—as I hope becomes apparent in "The Trouble with Geniuses" chapter. I also went to south China and hung out in rice paddies, and went to this weird little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one ever has a heart attack, and deciphered aircraft "black box" recorders with crash investigators. I should warn all potential readers that once you get interested in the world of plane crashes, it becomes very hard to tear yourself away. I'm still obsessed.

11. What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

12. I noticed that the book is dedicated to "Daisy." Who is she?

Daisy is my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, who was responsible for my mother's success—for the fact that my mother was able to get out of the little rural village in Jamaica where she grew up, get a University education in England and ultimately meet and marry my father. The last chapter of Outliers is an attempt to understand how Daisy was able to make that happen—using all the lessons learned over the course of the book. I've never written something quite this personal before. I hope readers find her story as moving as I did.

[LenaHuat]

Inspired by the British poet, (Browning : “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"), Barton Biggs has written the book "A Hedge Fund Tale of Reach and Grasp: Or What's a Heaven For?".

You can read a free version of it on Google.

[LenaHuat]

Kinokuniya is having a 20% discounted sale for members.
I bought 2 books by Gombrich:-
(1) A Little History of the World
(2)The Story of Art

I have started reading both simultaneously and am thoroughly enthralled by this German writer's intellectual sparkle.

[winston]

Top 10 Strangest How-to Books
Source: TopTenz.net

We all know about how-to, DIY, books for dummies, whatever you want to call them, pieces of literature.

With censorship out the window and freedom of speech blowing in, anyone can publish whatever they want.

Here are the top 10 strangest how-to books that will most definitely leave you thinking "why?"

And yes, all of these books are real books and can be purchased at Amazon.

10. How to Steal a Dog

9. How to Make a Dirty Movie

8. How to be a Pope

7. How to Break the Cycle of Life and Death

6. How to Raise and Keep a Dragon

5. How to Start Your Own Country

4. How to Pee Standing Up

Apparently, being a girl and being able to pee while standing up is "hip." I didn't know women were looking to be more like men.

3. How to Speak Cat

2. How to Survive a Robot Uprising

1. How to Become a Schizophrenic


http://www.mindpowernews.com/StrangeHowToBooks.htm

[LenaHuat]

I have a collection of Robert Alter's books. Yesterday I bought his latest:-
The Wisdom Books
The central theme of all 3 books is about the nature of humankind and life in this world.
Jobs is not even Jewish. God is rarely mentioned in the books. But where can wisdom be found? Where can knowledge be found?

For this is the evil in all that is done under the sun, for all have a single fate, and also the heart of the sons of man is full of evil, and revelry in their heart while they live, and afterwards - off to the dead.

For he who is joined to the living knows one sure thing : that a live dog is better than a dead lion.
For the living know that they will die, and the dead know nothing, and they no longer have recompense, for their memory is forgotten. Their love and their hatred as well, their jealousy, too are already lost, and they no longer have any share forever in all that is done under the sun.

Go, eat your bread with rejoining and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already been pleased by your deeds. At every season let your garments be white, and let oil on your head not be lacking.

Enjoy life with a woman whom you love all your days of mere breath that have been given to you under the sun, all your days of mere breath, for that is your share of life and in your toil that you toil under the sun.

All that your hand manages to do with your strength, do, for there is no doing nor reckoning nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol where you are going.

Nor does man know his time, like fish caught in a evil net and like birds held in a trap, like them the sons of man are ensnared by an evil time when it suddenly falls upon them.

Wisdom, too, have I seen under the sun, and it is great in my eyes.

[sidney]

Currently Harris bookstore at 313 somerset having 25% discount. From now Until mid apr, 17apr if I remember correctly.

[sidney]

Hi people,

there is a good deal in the US. If u are a book lover cum online shoppies, check this out.

http://www.tremendouslifebooks.com/products.asp?cat=2

I have shopped once before here. Please do go take a look at their "clearance stocks" .... we can get value buy here. No doubt there are pretty old books.. some of them are classics like the millionaire mind. Some discount goes from Usd 2 to Usd 8.

In comparison to normal bookstore clearance sales we found in Expo, this is the better deal to shop online. The best deal so far i experience is when i when to Expo (popular book fair sales in march 2011) where i spent $108 to buy 17 books

If i remember correctly my books i brought online here average about <$9 include shipping per book. Can't remember.

Winston, i think you like spirtual books so you can broswse through the spiritual sector, see if there's any classics you can find.

Everyone, remember, the best deal is in the clearance section only, the rest are not worth value buy, as Singapore is likely to get better rates.

My shopping experience: Of all books i brought, only one is abit "dirty of dust", the rest are in good condition, as if it is brand new ( not the old stock, full of dirt condition).

How to get most benefits:

Select a wide variety of books which you estimate to be below 160 pages (so that it is aggregate weight is light). Because from my experience, feight may be even more expensive than the books you brought.
Try not to buy hardcover unless there is price discrimation as it is heavier.

Do not ask the online store to ship directly from US to SG.

I used Vpost to ship to get better feight rates rather than get the online store to ship. Rememmber, Vpost have discount codes too.. so shop around and see if using Ocbc, Posb,.. blahh is better.

How to use Vpost
a) Sign up Vpost as a member
b) order your bks and get the online shop to ship your stuff to a US address provided by Vpost
c) Print screen your book order and email to Vpost to inform them
D) Vpost will acknowledge your order. This stage you must pay Vpost
E) Vpost will fetch your order from a US address and ship to SG.
F) Wait roughly 7-9 days for it to arrive to SG

Recommendations

Treasury of Success Unlimited
Millionaire Mind
Seasons of life - Jim Rohn
Weekend Seminar - Jim Rohn
The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar (Hardcover)
100 Most Important Bible Verses for Leaders
Staying Up, Up, Up In A Down, Down World (Paperback): Daily Hope for the Daily Grind ( Hohoho 1USD only )
God's Wisdom for Daily Living - Wha lao... Leather bound copy only 3 USD. Very good book for me.
Miracle of Right Thought - Best deal! Cost only 2 USD! This writer wrote classics even b4 Earl Nightingale

[winston]

"When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing."
Enrique Jardiel Poncela

[winston]

How much does it cost to come out with a book like this ? And more importantly, how many people will really buy it ?

Book On History Of Causeway To Be Launched Soon

SINGAPORE, June 21 (Bernama) -- The Malaysian government, with the cooperation of Singapore, had completed a book on the history of the Johor Causeway, said Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim

http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v5/ne ... ?id=595522

[winston]

Dice Have No Memory… and Neither Do Most Investors by Alexander Green

Today we stand at a unique crossroads. There are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of the economy, the financial markets and our standard of living. And good reasons to be entirely pessimistic, too.

Let me begin with the case for optimism. It’s called the profit motive. And though folks on one side of the political aisle tend to see it as gauche, selfish and exploitative, over the last few hundred years it has managed to lift the world out of poverty and create unparalleled prosperity in the West. (And now many developing countries are experiencing the transformative power of privatization, deregulation and economic incentives, too.)

There is, however, a fly in the ointment. And it’s bigger than Jeff Goldblum. It’s called the public sector.

President Calvin Coolidge – the last president with whom I entirely agreed – used to say that if you see a problem coming down the road you shouldn’t worry. Nine times out of 10 it will run into a ditch before it gets to you.

But mounting public debt and unfunded liabilities (currently amounting to more than $534,000 per U.S. household) aren’t going to fall into a ditch, however much we may wish it. Rather they’ll hit us headlong. And it won’t be pretty.

Investors are (finally) beginning to recognize this. Everywhere you go, people openly fret about the tsunami of federal debt that threatens to swamp the financial markets and our standard of living.

What should you do? You might start by listening to the folks who correctly predicted and profited from it.

For example, 11 years ago my friend and colleague Bill Bonner beat the drum loudly for his “Trade of the Decade:” Sell the dollar and buy gold. At the time, gold was selling for around $264 an ounce. Today it sells for roughly $1,500. And the greenback? Let’s just say you rarely hear Americans bragging about all the bargains in Switzerland.

Of course, many money managers and investment gurus now claim that they foresaw the financial crisis. Many have selective memories. Yet more than a year before the crisis broke, Bill published his runaway bestseller Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis.

The book made fortunes for some readers… and saved the fortunes of others. However, the problems Bill foresaw in the public sector have only worsened in the past few years. Fortunately, he has a new book out, Dice Have No Memory, a selection of essays that paints a sobering view of our financial future.

This is a book worth reading, even if you don’t agree with it. Perhaps especially if you don’t agree with it.

Investors (and human beings generally) have a natural tendency to read only views they already subscribe to. That can be a mistake. To make good investment decisions, you need to expose yourself to intelligent viewpoints on every part of the spectrum.

And I can guarantee you’ll enjoy reading Bill’s. Whether he’s describing the ineptitude of the Fed, the War on Terror (“the first fighting war against nobody in particular ever proposed”), or some hot investment system de jour, his essays are unfailingly smart, funny and wise.

I’m an optimist at heart. Bill isn’t. I think the strengths of business can ultimately overcome the stupidity and ineptitude of government. Bill is less sanguine, to put it mildly.

Dice Have No Memory is a pleasure to read and belongs in every serious investor’s library. Not just because Bill Bonner’s views are well argued and witty, but because history may very well prove him right… again.

http://www.investmentu.com/2011/dice-ha ... emory.html