Outliers: The Story of Success in Extreme Book Nerd Challenge 2018 (unofficial)

Aug 27, 2011 Eric rated it liked it · review of another edition

Malcom Gladwell, writer of Blink and Tipping Point, returns with this new book which is ostensibly about success, but appears to be more about luck. Book clubs have loved Gladwell’s books and it is easy to see why – Gladwell is an excellent story teller - but whatever point he is trying to make seems to get lost in the anecdotes.

Gladwell basically states his goal out right at the beginning of the book that he wants to change the way people think about success and that the way we currently think Malcom Gladwell, writer of Blink and Tipping Point, returns with this new book which is ostensibly about success, but appears to be more about luck. Book clubs have loved Gladwell’s books and it is easy to see why – Gladwell is an excellent story teller - but whatever point he is trying to make seems to get lost in the anecdotes.

Gladwell basically states his goal out right at the beginning of the book that he wants to change the way people think about success and that the way we currently think about success is all wrong. The problem with this goal is he presupposes that everyone perceives extreme success as a product soley of hard work and intelligence. He assumes that his readership thinks that culture and upbringing has little or no impact on a person’s success. That’s ludicrous. I expect that just about everyone would agree that success is a result of a combination hard work, intelligence, personality, culture, upbringing, and opportunity. That is the same thing that Gladwell is trying to convey to his reader, except he backs it up with cool stories.

Sometimes I take real issue with his logic. He lays out a study, for example, that says that generally speaking people need 10,000 hours of experience in a field to become an expert. He “proves” this theory with the success stories of the Beatles and Bill Gates. Now, I’m not really a logistician, but I don’t think you can prove a theory in general by providing two case studies that are known statistical outliers. But then in both cases he describes how they were able to get the opportunities to practice in there fields. The lesson he takes from this is that they were lucky beneficiaries of a series of fortunate events. The lesson I took from it was that they were both lucky, but more importantly they were tenacious, taking advantage of every opportunity provided to them. Yes, the luck played a huge factor, but Gates still had to be willing to put in the time when most other kids his age were "chilling" with their buds or playing sports, and that was the common trait that ran through all the success stories.

Logic aside this was a very enjoyable and enlightening read. I was particularly interested several sections:

* How IQ does (and doesn’t) correlate to success
* How children’s success rate is impacted by birth-month
* How summer vacation impacts childhood development
* How airplane crashes that can be caused by cultural differences in communication (and how airlines can fix the problem)

Overall, I had some real issues reading this book, but once I got past the first few chapters I really enjoyed it. The title to the book might be more accurately changed to “Outliers: An Entertaining Book About a Few Interesting and Extreme Success Stories and What We Might or Might Not Learn from Them Depending on How You Interpret the Anecdotal Evidence.”
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Aug 19, 2019 Thacia rated it it was amazing

Malcolm Gladwell is a tremendous story teller and he explains how to improve your life and make it better so well. This book is no exception. I have read several books by Malcolm Gladwell and I hae loved them all. This one has amazing stories to drive home all of his points. He just makes such brilliant connections and analogies to help the reader understand the points made. Great book.

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