Blog #8: Sabry Tozin

 For this Blog, I chose to write about Saby Tozin, who is Director of Enterprise Applications for Netflix. Sabry, grew up in the Congo, and was surrounded by people who were either really well-off, or desperately poor. For most of Sabry's younger years, he wanted to be a civil engineer just so he could be like his father, but as time passed, he was more interested in computer science. Sabry had already began going to school to get his engineering degree. Sabry failed,  his second calculus class, and there were still seven more math classes to come before he could get his engineering degree. Sabry, called his father crying and told him he’d failed, his second math class, and  his dad said, “Well, what do you want to do now?” In that moment Sabry realize that it’s not about failing, it’s about how you react to failure and how you come back from it. After that he  retook the class and studied harder so that he could pass this time. He took a job in the I.T. department at his college, and by the time he graduated, he knew he wanted to move to Silicon Valley and work in the tech industry. Sabry says, that he got to where he is today by finding self-confidence, where he learned to love himself and to expect big things from himself.

Sabry's story is similar to chapter 9 in the book Outliers, because like Marita, Bill Gates, and the Canadian hokey player, he had to work hard to get to where he is now. His childhood surroundings are similar to what Gladwell, said in the chapter. For example, in the book it talked about how kids in poor families were as educationally advanced as the kids in the upper and middle class, but when the summer came they lost everything they had worked so hard to learn since their parents could not afford materials, so they could keep practicing. It was the same thing with the people at Sabry's school.