Book review written by Physics Teacher, Kevin Barron

A look at what really makes success.

This book changes the way you look at the media headlines by scraping away the rhetoric from attention grabbing headlines. It gives facts to put plausible explanations from a wide range of examples from sport, music and business. It gives you an insight to what is really going on around success. It probes successful people's culture, family, generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.

I loved the explanation behind the 10,000 hours making a sports champion. How this simple sentence is now often quoted by people but in the book proves to be completely misunderstood.

It will take you on a journey, for example, exposing the New York crime management tactics of ‘recovering the streets one street at a time’ and ‘three strikes and you're out’. In reality this success in reducing crime can be attributed to something else. A major election was won on the back of this claim but instead something else that was driving the drop in crime statistics that everyone had overlooked.

As a dyslexic I read very few books and it was recommended to me and I simply could not put it down. I liked that I can now have conversations that put explanations and facts to well known popular myths of why people are really successful.