OUTLIERS

OUTLIERS – The Story of SUCCESS

This isn’t blog of my own thoughts, this is just brief version of OUTLIERS book. Helps to rewind in future and also get an idea for those haven’t read the book.

Meaning:

1. Something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.
2. A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

The Roseto Mystery:

THESE PEOPLE WERE DYING OF OLD AGE. THAT’S IT.

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian. For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in marble quarries in surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was hard, barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope in economic betterment until word reached Roseto at the end of 19^th century of the land opportunity across the ocean.

After getting jobs in slate quarry, began buying land in down hill and built church. Priest encouraged townsfolk to clear the land and plant vegetables and fruits in backyards. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life.

Neighboring Bangor was largely welsh and English and next town was German, which meant – given fractious relationships between English and Germans and Italians in those years – that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans.

Wolf physician, was invited to give a talk and after that local doctor said. ‘You know, I’ve been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease’.

Wolf got busy, decided to do a preliminary study, in 1961. Mayor said all my sisters are going to help you.

“There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn’t have anyone on welfare. These people were dying of old age. That’s it”.

Wolf began to realize was that secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location. It had to be Roseto itself. Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why.

“They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to church and saw how unifying and calming effect.”

Living a long life, we thought it was our gene, we chose to eat, to exercise, medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.