The rule of 10,000 hours is well known: If you want to excel at something, spend an inordinate amount of time practicing and honing your skills. This book conveys the opposite message. It shows how breadth in interests, intuition, and general curiosity can produce new insights and innovation.
Drawing on a range of examples from sport to science, the author certainly convinced me (who can perhaps identify more easily with the message than many).
After reading this, you'll never speak disparagingly about amateurs again.
'Fascinating . . . If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you' - Bill Gates
The instant Sunday Times Top Ten and New York Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A Financial Times Essential Reads
A powerful argument for how to succeed in any field: develop broad interests and skills while everyone around you is rushing to specialize.
From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many…
Known in Scandinavia mainly for her intense poetry, the Swedish author Karin Boye wrote this novel in 1940, recently published in a new English translation. It is a dystopian novel written in the shadow of Stalinism and Nazism, depicting an authoritarian society where the individual is seen as a threat to the common good.
The protagonist, Kall, invents a drug which has an enormous impact. This novel defends its place between Huxley and Orwell, chronologically and thematically.
In some ways, it is superior to them, by incorporating gender relations and family life, neglected by the more famous authors.
This classic Swedish novel envisioned a future of drab terror. Seen through the eyes of idealistic scientist Leo Kall, Kallocain's depiction of a totalitarian world state is a montage of what novelist Karin Boye had seen or sensed in 1930s Russia and Germany. Its central idea grew from the rumors of truth drugs that ensured the subservience of every citizen to the state.
Do we really need another book of world history? Yes, We needed this one.
Montefiore tells the story of human society through a number of carefully selected families and their relationships, thereby connecting the intimate with the geopolitical, trivia with statesman craft, family with empire.
The author is an excellent storyteller and a reliable witness. He comes across as someone you would want to share a cognac with by the fireplace. Naturally, he tells stories that had to be left out of the book.
THE TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
From the master storyteller and internationally bestselling author - the story of humanity from prehistory to the present day, told through the one thing all humans have in common: family.
We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis…
We live in a time of global crisis—or, more appropriately, crises: overlapping, interlocking global problems that are inextricably tied to modernity. Overheatingoffers a groundbreaking new way of looking at the problems of the Anthropocene, exploring crises of the environment, economy, and identity through an anthropological lens.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues that while each of these crises is global in scope, they are nonetheless perceived and responded to locally—and that once we realize that, we begin to see the contradictions that abound between the standardizing forces of global capitalism and the socially embedded nature of people and local practices.
Only by acknowledging the primacy of the local, Eriksen shows, can we begin to even properly understand, let alone address, these problems on a global scale.
