August Rigo on his Outliers moment

August Rigo is a Toronto singer-songwriter. His album The Fall Out was nominated for "R&B/Soul Recording of the Year" at the 2016 Juno Awards. Rigo says he's been on a "Malcolm Gladwell spree" lately, and he told The Next Chapter about his personal connection with Gladwell's 2008 bestseller, Outliers.

Outliers talks about circumstance and how circumstances affect extraordinary people — as much as they're skilled and intelligent, circumstances are such a big contributing factor to their success. One story that really stuck out to me was a story about geniuses, and there's this little kid who was raised in a low-income family who gets a scholarship and then loses his scholarship because his mother didn't fill out the proper paperwork for him.

This really hit home for me because my father is from the Philippines, extremely poor, and he was in the top 1 per cent of his class in the Philippines and he was chosen to go to engineering school. But my grandmother didn't have enough money to send him on the bus, so he just didn't go. Subsequently he got to Canada and things worked out, but who knows what my dad could have done if he was able to be an engineer and fulfil his genius. Because of his circumstance, he couldn't do it.

The book made me think about my circumstances and be more self-aware, because I'm having this internal battle — am I going to let my circumstance affect my outcome? I'm always thinking about that when I'm reading this book — where's my outlier moment? What's the path that'll lead me to greatness?

August Rigo's comments have been edited and condensed.