Malcom Gladwell: Outliers
I purchased this book out of curiosity, and after reading the first couple of chapters I can conclude it has been worth it. It is of high relevance to my own life. In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier. In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetic