Ladies, before we get into discussion about deep rooted issues and concerns that you wish to express (and hopefully solve), let me interest you in a book that I recently read: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell, with his ingenious writing ability has once again managed to captivate the masses with this ever so profound and enlightening book. I admire his ability to explain and express his research with such precision that he would have even the most cynical of people eating out of the palm of his hand.
Gladwell explains that success should not necessarily be left solely to hard work, but that it also lies in appropriate and timely positioning, a series of extremely fortunate events, LUCK, and let's not forget the 10,000 Hour Rule!!While I completely agree with him 110%, I can't help but wonder: If you are an aspiring corporate lawyer in New York, hoping to be successful and powerful one day, are you at a loss if you aren't a Jewish man who was born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry? (According to Gladwell's research, powerful and highly successful lawyers living in New York city have the same profile: they are Jewish, were part of the generation born in the Depression and had parents who worked in the garment business.)
While one may take Gladwell's explanations quite literally, what he simply tries to explain is that often enough our understanding of success is crude, and that in defining success, we should not focus so much on an individual - describing the characteristics, habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world, but rather closely study his/her surroundings - his/her culture, community, family and generation. As he says, "We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest."
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