Boulder to London

At the airport in London, Melisse and I picked up a few books.  I got a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled “Outliers” as well as Thomas Friedman’s new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded”.  You may recognize Gladwell’s name as he previously authored Blink and The Tipping Point.  Friedman is a foreign affairs columnist for the NY Times and author of several best sellers including The World is Flat and The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

I worked through Gladwell’s new book quickly.  I was half way done by the time we landed in Barcelona and finished it off on Tuesday.  The book actually read a little like Freakenomics with a ton of ah-ha moments and insight backed by data driven analysis.  The purpose of the book is to explain how people become “Outliers” and really stand out as extraordinary and accomplished.  People like  Bill Gates, The Beatles, Mozart, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are a few names that come to mind in this context.  Gladwell uses several examples to prove that it isn’t a case of natural ability, but a set or circumstances (that may happen by chance, or maybe carefully planned) that leads to success and above all, it is experience, practice and preparation.  He says that the magic number is 10,000.  If you spend 10,000 hours practicing something, you can likely master it at the world class level.  In addition to the practice, your timing has to be right as well.  Bill Gates couldn’t have become BIll Gates at any other point in history (or in the future).  It was a very interesting read and I highly recommend it along with Gladwell’s other two books.

The second book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded”, I’m about a third of the way through.  It’s also quite good, although not really a light read.  Friedman’s latest book takes a look at population growth, oil consumption and global warming through the eyes of a foreign affairs columnist.  One of the ideas he develops is a correlation between freedom and democracy in oil producing countries and the price of a barrel of oil.  When the price of oil is high, freedom is relatively low.  When oil is cheap, measures of freedom, democracy and human rights rise.  He explains the tie and provides a compelling case that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not tied to diplomacy, military power, the rise of democracy or anything else, but rather to the fall in the price of oil in the 1980s.  I’ll give a more full review once I’m done with it, but right now I strongly recommend it.