Outliers: The Story of Success is the non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how two people with exceptional intelligence—Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer—end up with such vastly different fortunes, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, and how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the …
Outliers: The Story of Success is the non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how two people with exceptional intelligence—Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer—end up with such vastly different fortunes, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, and how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study have disputed Gladwell's usage.The book debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Generally well received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by Outliers, finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. The writing style, though deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex social phenomena.
Review of 'Outliers: The Story of Success' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Malcolm Gladwell is a different type of psychology book than I usually read. He has a place introducing ideas in broad strokes, but it’s a lower tier of informative than books written by psychologists who have broad understanding of the research and have done some original study of their own. If you want an extremely accessible introduction to the idea of expertise and the value of practice, this is OK.
If you want a well sourced, more comprehensive understanding of what the research does and doesn’t say, and how to apply the principles supported by the research, read Peak by K Anders Ericsson and Robert Poole. It’s denser, but it discusses some of the flaws of Gladwell’s presentation and is overall held to a more rigorous standard.
Review of 'Outliers: The Story of Success' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is uplifting because it promises us we can master our destinies. What at first blush might correctly be seen as a debunking of the notion that genius is the sole product of mysterious innate ability is also a celebration of the confluence of natural ability, unusual opportunity, dedicated practice and good fortune that has produced such prodigious individuals as Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Canada's hockey champions, classical musicians, Asian math champions, New York's Jewish lawyers, and even a bestselling half-Jamaican Canadian author.
An essential ingredient in Gladwell's recipe for genius is hard work, at least 10,000 hours of practice before one reaches true proficiency in any discipline. A predicate for that kind of practice, however, is not merely inner discipline but opportunity. Bill Joy and Bill Gates had rare opportunities in the form of essentially unlimited free access to programming time on computers at a …
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is uplifting because it promises us we can master our destinies. What at first blush might correctly be seen as a debunking of the notion that genius is the sole product of mysterious innate ability is also a celebration of the confluence of natural ability, unusual opportunity, dedicated practice and good fortune that has produced such prodigious individuals as Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Canada's hockey champions, classical musicians, Asian math champions, New York's Jewish lawyers, and even a bestselling half-Jamaican Canadian author.
An essential ingredient in Gladwell's recipe for genius is hard work, at least 10,000 hours of practice before one reaches true proficiency in any discipline. A predicate for that kind of practice, however, is not merely inner discipline but opportunity. Bill Joy and Bill Gates had rare opportunities in the form of essentially unlimited free access to programming time on computers at a time when such access was a rare commodity. Coupled with this rare access in their youth, they along with most other household names in the computer industry were able to gain such extraordinary experience at just the moment when the computer industry was undergoing a tectonic shift from the clunky batch-programmed mainframes that had hitherto dominated the industry to the revolutionary light personal computers that represented the future. A few years earlier and they would have been wedded to the mainframe dinosaurs of the past, a few years later and they would they would have been too late to play a critical role in shaping the future and would simply have joined the herd rather than leading the charge.
Gladwell's conclusion is that once we dispense with the notion that genius is spontaneous, innate, and mysterious, we are liberated to cultivate it. To be sure, not every seed will grow to be a Giant Sequoia, but even the seeds of the Giant Sequoia will come to nothing if they are cast upon dry stone. And Gladwell broadens his analysis to include not merely a condemnation of lack of opportunity, but also a critique of culture. In successive examples, he shows that the occupations cultures pursue, the hardships they suffer, and even the syntax of their language and content of their manners can have a critical effect on their economic success, job performance, or intellectual achievement. Far from succumbing to a crude determinism, however, Gladwell holds forth the possibility that by enriching our children's opportunities and examining our thinking, we can create the conditions necessary for civilization to flourish in new abundance.
