tipping point - Book journal

Malcolm Gladwell is an expert in writing book about the things we know already (very vaguly) and make an compelling book with storytelling and statistics.. he must be the perfect author for the current information overloaded culture.

Tipping point said to be his best, but for me listening in audio format felt 'outliers' was interesting and stories remained in memory for relatively more time.

the law of few - it is true that few people make a big difference and also some critical piece of work make a big difference in a big project. Here the point is not about innovation but marketing. I feel we play all these roles sometimes in different context. Gladwell categorizes these people, so it makes it easier to find who is who is future...

Stickiness factor - we are living in a era of short memory loss.. stickiness could be a day to a week. In the case of viral videos it could be an hour of fame. There is a war out there in advertising, web and entertainment to make a thing sticky. the point to make your stuff sticky specifically to your target audience. Sometimes the stickiness can come from a funny context or intelligence or experience.

new york crime example - this is a fascinating story of how new york subway handled crime by simply clearing the cars from graffiti everyday. You can make a big difference by making small spirited changes. Like if you allow small mistakes in a project to go by and didnt appreciate the people taking care of those stuff..then the manager is setting a wrong example. Its all about defined values. And always values are simple and to the core.

Connectivity - You are connected to anyone in this world in a factor of six. this may be reduced after facebook and linkedin. And 150 is the number where a group or organization can work effectively. I see the reason why my company split organizations without any reason and give meaningless names to those groups.

Teenage smoking issue - simple in one line "experimenting may not become a habit". We can protect our kids only to a certain extent from smoking. But anyway they are going to try at least once, but that doesn't means that they are hooked forever. More than 80% of kids who tried smoking quit is along the way. Chippers is the name for occasional and non-addictive smokers.

Prelude - Identifying mavens.. identifying the right context.. identifying minor signs before they tip..

How small things can bring big impact.. small things mostly are in our control..

Moonwalking with Einstein - Book Journal

The book cover itself says its not another "mind power" book.. with boring technical and mostly impractical and sometimes with petty techniques which I already posses..

Author Foer takes us a journey which he takes to win the American memory championship by sprinkling some of the techniques he used to remember different stuff. Certainly the book is not for learning new memory techniques as the author just gives a glimpse and feel of those techniques, its upto the reader to dig-deeper those sprinkled techniques. Rather the book is successful in being interesting, funny and informative. Since Im reading the Malcolm Gladwell series, MWE narration comes closer to Outliers. And some of the information is there in both the books, which makes me think both Foer or Gladwell are originator of the original idea (like the 10,000 hrs deliberate work) they are just aggregators and presenters of existing facts..

Memory palace - eventhough this is a technique we all use to keep things in memory, we can deliberately build memory palaces (with the places we know well) for certain group of things. This is helpful to me in preserving things to do, passwords and some numbers. the trick is to assign weird images/persons or persons doing weird things.

remembering cards - the POA method seems to be very effective (person Object Activity). For each card in the deck assign a personality doing some action on an object

A-spade - Rajnikanth wearing a coolers
2-spade - Kamal kissing a girl
3-spade - vijay dancing on a table
4-spade - Ajith raising his red-shirts collar

And when you get a 3 card combination we can create a mental image of POA
Ajith dancing with a girl represents 4-spade,3-spade,2-spade..
Its hard to remember the image for each card, but once it is assigned with practice its possible to remember atleast 10 cards I think !!

remembering numbers - this can be done with the same technique above by assigning a image to each 2 digit combination (this is hard I think but possible with deliberate practise)

extreme peoples -
Other interesting part is about a man who forgets the breakfast he had 5 mins back and some info on the famous Rain man. The interesting information is our time will seems longer if you have more memories about the time-period. Like the vacations, the job changes, important events and successful events

Role of memory in education -
I feel education needs some memory to analyze the data.. the future is of-course how effectively we analyze the data, but memory also plays a part it seems..

Overall interesting read other than boring self-improvement books which always portraits an ideal personality (which in reality cant exists)

Outliers by Malcom - book journal

Just to record my understanding, perspective of listening to the book 'Outlier'

The beginning of the book about an italian immigrant community in Pittsburg is a good start. How a certain community alone can evade the wrath of heart-attack the prominent killer of modern time.. Im interested more in this story since I myself has a high-cholestrol and my Dad died of stroke. The answers is typical to the author it seems. His perspective that the community and being belonging to the community avoids heart-attack and other diseases was appealing to me. Because I too saw men who are happier and who has a dont care attitude or self-sufficient lives longer. Anyway my learning ' have friends, be closer to your community, have a laugh and become content at some point in life :-)'

The other stories I liked is the 10000 hours of work all the successful people put into to became one.. like the beatles, bill gates, bill joyce and all the star sports people.

Although 10000 hours may seems distant .. it is possible in a distant timeframe.. Im turning 31 soon. say I spent a hour every working day during my past 8 years of professional life (8 x 24 x 12) = 2300.. i have a deficit of 7700 hours..

@ 2 hrs / day = 13 yrs

@ 3 hrs / day = 9 yrs

@ 4 hrs / day = 6.5 yrs

Being married and have a kid, even 4 hrs a day is a high cost (with so much distraction around).. but being a ambitious man I have to..The only way is to make my job a learning arena. This is the only time I can concentrate. The trick is to have a job which gives that..Lets see if I have the opportunity and luck to keep that for next 7 years from now..I would be 38 by that time :-)

Malcom is a strong advocate through out the book for the impact of culture and ethnicity on success.. I gotto think about mine to see what is there in my story although im not a outlier (maybe Im one considering my schoolmates and most from my childhood neighbours)

im fortunate to have graduated father and mother when most of the kids has none of them educated or one of them, my mom being a intelligent woman understands the need for education and puts so much time/money to teach me eventhough I didnt have nice teachers all through my life..Although I havent scored much in the examinations I certainly felt bright and intelligent. Choosing the IT as my engineering instead of more fashionable aerospace, marine or electronics...Thankful the IT industry boom in India and to land on right job which will later send me for a project to US..

The other very important learning I got is - why certain people are so outspoken and have the trick of getting anything they want. Its from their parents and environment / ethnicity.

Its good to expose children to many talents at an earlier stage, they might catchup something or they will understand how to cope with multiple things. Parents should be an example like giving freedom to children, spouse, listening manners. If possible send them to private school to get a good learing and have a oppurtunity to have more learning time.

according to outliers -- success is -- right man (willing to work and work hard) right time (grab the occasion) with right environment ( with the tools and oppurtunity) with right mindset (heriditary and ethnicity related) will seize to success!!