No One Ever Makes It Alone

Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is one of my favorite books (and I have mentioned here on this blog so many times). There are so many little precious lessons in that book, I love it.  But the most important lesson I took home was Christopher Langan story. This country preaches so much on pseudo self-reliance (completely different from Emerson's version), we blindly start believing in the omnipotence of individualism and dwell in that awful Lake Wobengon effect - everyone believes they are above average. Here is old Times review of Outliers:

"According to Outliers, genius isn't the only or even the most important thing. Gladwell's weapon of choice when assaulting myths is the anecdote, and one of the book's most striking, and saddest, is the strange story of Christopher Langan, a man who despite an IQ of 195 (Einstein's was 150) wound up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri. Why isn't he a nuclear rocket surgeon? Because of the environment he grew up in: there was no one in Langan's life and nothing in his background that could help him capitalize on his exceptional gifts. "He had to make his way alone," Gladwell writes, "and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone."