What is Reddit's opinion of Outliers: The Story of Success?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

>Environment doesn't guarantee anything: Rags-to-riches happen.

You should read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

>Blaming everything on forces beyond your control is a bad mental habit; it becomes an excuse not to try to help yourself.

It's important to assign blame correctly. Taking responsibility for problems which are not your fault is just as unhealthy as failing to take responsibility for problems that are your fault.

Pretending talent matters to the degree common society believes it to exist is a shield for the lazy. “I’m just not talented enough to succeed”. Bullshit, you just don’t want to spend the literal 10,000 hours it takes to build true proficiency in a given activity. You don’t have to believe me though, science and years of extensive studies across a broad range of demographics, activities, and nationalities have proven this time and again. The following link is just one of MANY phenomenal books on the subject. (https://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell-ebook/dp/B001ANYDAO)

You really don’t have to believe me, you can look up any of a variety of academic studies on the matter, books examining those studies, and much much more. ‘Talent’ and ‘intelligence’ as the average individual understands them are only an extremely minor component of success in a given activity. It’s only when one of those things directly and significantly affects the ability of an individual to obtain quality practice that they begin to have an effect (but even so, quantity of time spent mastering an activity is a much better indicator).

I use this information as a reason to ignore simple measures of intelligence and talent and instead focus on working obsessively toward my goals. This is never an excuse to not succeed, quite the opposite, but a call to action for actual measurable work toward an individual’s success.