Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

He calls it "The Story of Success" and he's a best selling author of other books like Blink. Gladwell's three successful books spread like a phenomenon. The points in this book should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of success in their own lives. Malcolm's point is that, essentially, successful people and their success aren't completely random and unpredictable like their popular stories may lead everyone else to believe. Their success is a combination of specific conditions, experiences, and opportunities in time that existed around them and not necessarily anyone else. His examples are people like the elite Canadian hockey leaguers, Bill Gates, and eminent jewish New York lawyers born in the 1930s.

This book qualifies as airplane and bathroom reading. It isn't going to change your life, or your decision making. I bought it after reading a positive review on good ole Slashdot. If you want me to buy your book, get it reviewed on Slashdot. If it's so popular, it must make people feel good. It's sort of an apology for being lucky. Gladwell tries hard to counter what he sees as popular myths. I think the people who will get this book already understand the principles and the people that might benefit from it won't get it anyways. It's basically a waste of natural resources.

Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The subtitle is "The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets." Taleb was a trader, by his own account a conservative and successful one, so I suppose he should know. He spends plenty of time recounting stories and relating them in a ranting, abstract, contrarian style. He's full of himself and, at times, hard to read. Taleb's main point is that many events in life are random, yet the human mind works hard to arrange events in such a way that the random comes together to make sense. We assign sequences of events to order where none existed. Traders might follow order that they've made sense of in their own minds, only to one day find their investments erased because they weren't accounting for the true randomness of the actual events.

If you can get past Taleb's writing style, you might enjoy the book. I thought Black Swan, also by Taleb, was much better, but I'm not quite ready to review it yet. Ideas presented in Fooled by Randomness such as Survivorship bias are essential for understanding of written word and history. Sure, the better you are at understanding the past, the better you can work in the future. Or was I just finding patterns in the random noise?