2008 In Books

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve just finished hearing this book by Malcolm Gladwell. I say ‘hearing’ because I managed to get hold of the audio book. After sitting through seven hours (1 hour per chapter) of Malcolm Gladwell’s narration, here are the things that I found interesting and useful.



- 10,000 Hours. That’s the minimum time required to achieve mastery of pretty much anything.
- Talent will not get you to the top. It will get you in through the door. You still have to work insanely hard to make something useful out of your talent.
- Outliers, or those that achieve far more success than normal, work much much harder than normal people. They are driven. They are able to work that hard because they are driven.
- Just working hard however is not enough. To be wildly successful, you must be in the right place, at the right time. You must get good opportunities.
- Where you come from makes affects chances of your success. Your culture, your family, the work that your parents do, all of this is directly correlated to your success.
- Hoffstede’s Cultural Dimensions: The result of a 20 year long study by a Dutch researcher. Classifies people of different countries based on 4 dimensions, thereby describing their behavior.

The End : Or shall I say, The Beginning?

After slogging through the weekend and using the services of WinAmp and two marvellous plug-in's : LoopMaster and Pacemaker, I have managed to decode the first few lines of this, very favourite of songs.

It remains to be verified by the Master. But it sounds really close. In any case, if it is wrong, I'll make corrections here.

My bet is that the song is in D-Major and the pitch is D, 3rd String, 7th Fret.
The song itself is in D Major.

The song goes like this:

[Notation: small letters mean flat notes. Underscores imply lower octave. / imples slide]

(4th String open) , S , N_/S P_ || X 2
S , N_ S S/R R/g/R S , S S S/N_/S S
P_ N_ S R G m G/m/G R