Officially reaching success requires setting goals. In the following video, through a series of interviews, actor Will Smith points out that “realistic” goals are useless – you have to aim for much, much more.

“It wasn’t realistic for us to be able to flip a light switch and have the light just cut on. Or, for someone to bend metal and have it be able to fly over oceans across the globe.”

As of the past year, my intake of books has increased tremendously. Call it the “reading bug,” or whatever seems appropriate, but going from reading one book every two months to about two a month is fairly significant.

Topics range from autobiographies, social theory, web design, and fiction.

Here are the last few –

Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

President-elect Obama writes of finding his own identity, chasing the trail left behind by the Kenyan father he met only two times. Starting the book with the news of his father’s passing away, he takes us through a journey of his upbringing, which spanned across the globe — Honolulu, Jakarta, New York, Massachusetts and eventually, on to settle into Chicago, Illinois.

The book is a raw, inner guide to the young president-elect as he tried to find his place among his peers, and in the world, as he constantly felt out of place. His stories are vivid, his travels are vast, and the in-depth revelation in Dreams from My Father is a perfect introduction to the mind of the soon-to-be President of the United States of America; his balancing of good and bad, just and unjust, black and white.

Definitely pick this up if you’re looking for insight as to what went through the mind of the man set to be The Man in a matter of days — written well before he was the iconic figure he is today.

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins

As a journalist with The New York Times, Filkins is given vast resources for digging into the inner cities and towns within Afghanistan and Iraq, during their some of their most contentious times. His stories paint a raw picture of American occupation in a foreign land — Iraq mostly — and the struggle in keeping peace when embedded in areas where insurgents are scattered about, and not always easy to weed out.

Forever War talks of the struggle between Iraqi and Afghan residents coping with foreign occupation, all the while trying to keep their families out of harm from insurgents terrorizing their land. It also talks of the many risks American troops face, laying their lives on the line to bring peace in countries they are not always welcomed “with open arms.”

In this book, Filkins does not editorialize his stories. They are simply reported as they occur, and in their raw detail each one reveals the relentless spirit of the many who are trying to bring peace to these war-torn countries. In the process, we really get a glimpse of the difficulty and life-risking maneuvers a journalist like Filkins must go through in order to relay the stories from beyond borders where stories of old used to never escape.

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Once again, Gladwell makes the reader put on a thinking cap and take a look into what makes a person successful. Is their success a credit to being geniuses at what they do, or is it also thanks to fortunate placement in a time or place? Outliers takes us through an in-depth look into situations where some “geniuses” are born into situations with great opportunities. The 10,000 hour rule — where to be a true and complete expert at a particular field, one would generally need to spend over 10,000 hour practicing — can only be achieved if someone like Bill Gates lives in the right area (Michigan) who gave him a unique opportunity to practice programming at a very young age. The child in the inner city single-parent home who gets chosen to attend a charter school where classes are more engaging than public schools, and because of their more intense workload, those who graduate gain a higher quality of education later in life.

Mostly, Outliers is a view into situations where it is revealed that success can be achieved through other means than being born a genius. It reveals cultural blockades that tend to occur even when it doesn’t seem immediately clear — in one instance he reveals how Korean Airlines went from being nearly shut down to becoming one of the safest airlines worldwide, all by addressing the way Korean culture traditionally communicated in the work place.

This book is a great, short read for those of you interested in finding out how some of the more conventional thoughts of success may not be entirely correct. Why did Joe X become a millionaire, and one of the best at what he does, and John Y not get beyond his initial show of intelligence, even when they both scored equally as high on aptitude tests? Was it that Joe X had more ambition than John Y? Or was it that Joe X happened to be born into the right situation where opportunities to succeed were readily available? Gladwell does not say this is the case all the time. However, he does make you ponder the endless possiblities of what less fortunate children could be if they were placed in a better situation to succeed.

Currently reading:

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner