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Outliers: The Story of Success |  | Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $27.99
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Rating:  971 reviews
Sales Rank: 19
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 309
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 0316017922
Dewey Decimal Number: 302
EAN: 9780316017923
ASIN: 0316017922
Publication Date: November 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, November 2008: Now that he's gotten us talking about the viral life of ideas and the power of gut reactions, Malcolm Gladwell poses a more provocative question in Outliers: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," he makes the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."
Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. --Mari Malcolm
Product Description
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 971
 Some interesting and provocative ideas July 29, 2010
Abby Thinker
Book contains some interesting and provocative ideas, especially for educators and those concerned with education. His last chapter - about the KIPP schools - is a fascinating plea for American schools to infuse more rigor (and quantity) to the educational school year. As a main part of Gladwell's thesis is that how hard one works (and is willing to work) is endemic to one's likelihood of success, we set students up for failure by not expecting them to work as hard as other countries expect of their students. This is especially true in the two chapters devoted to debunking the myth that intelligence is the key to success. Unfortunately, Dan Goleman beat him to the punch way back in 1995 with his book "Emotional Intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ.". If readers keep that in mind, they won't be too disappointed by the methods or originality of the research. His job is to weave together an interesting story, which is something Gladwell does exceedingly well. If all you want is some good entertainment and fodder for cocktail party discussions, Outliers might make a nice addition to your bookshelves.
Controversial opinion July 27, 2010
Ronnie "booklover" Dan
The main tenet of Outliers is that there is a logic behind why some people become successful, and it has more to do with legacy and opportunity than high IQ. He simply makes the point that both encountered the kind of "right place at the right time" opportunity that allowed them to capitalize on their talent, a delineation that often separates moderate from extraordinary success. The author asserts that there is no such thing as a self-made man, that "the true origins of high achievement" lie instead in the circumstances and influences of one's upbringing, combined with excellent timing. Gladwell suggests that things like what income level, culture, and time of a child's birth are important contributors to success, as well as a person's tenacity and agility. As the last of these is the least conventional, think of it this way: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many other computer masterminds would likely not have distinguished themselves.
Very interesting! July 27, 2010
A. Paxman
We read this book for our book club, and I found it very interesting! Although, there were some things that I thought were perhaps a bit of a stretch, I loved to learn the backgrounds of the people he discussed and the possibilities of the effect it had on shaping their futures. It will definitely be an interesting discussion at book club.
Fun to read but scientifically questionable July 24, 2010
Christian Kober (Shanghai)
Malcolm Gladwell is in this book looking at the hidden patterns behind success. Since early 18th century there has been a cult of the 'genius', e.g. a believe that achievement in arts and sciences is linked to being a 'genius', some mythical quality which falls outside of normal experience and is something like a gift from the gods.
Gladwell does well in attacking the notion that genius is god given. He (to my understanding) does not dispute that some people for example have musical talent while others have not. But to become a superstar amongst thousands of musically gifted it also requires hard work. And hard work in its turn requires that you have a supportive family and a suitable material background - e.g. if you have to work all day on the farm you will not be able to spend much time on piano lessons.
And to some extent hard work and determination even trumps talent.
Yet first of all - is this really news? I remember learning that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
Secondly - many of the examples he uses seem to be statistically irrelevant. For your career success it is obviously better to have an IQ of 120 rather than 70. Yet will someone with an IQ of 130 enjoy more success than someone with an IQ of 120? Not only can it be debated how meaningful IQ measurements above 120 really are, also, like in many other fields, there are some threshholds above which other factors start to count. With cars in F1, above a certain top speed to add more speed does not help, factors like agility etc. come into play. And his example regarding the influence of the date of birth on your success in sports - well, I checked the German National Soccer team. The players were born in the following quarters of the year: Q1: 4; Q2: 6; Q3: 6; Q4: 6. This is as even as it gets in statistics.
Then he even tries to link performance to culture. For example by linking the undeniable superiority of Asian high school students in certain fields to a culture of rice growing. First - why does he link it to rice growing rather than the many thousands of years of confucian tradition of learning? At least the latter would explain why students from North China (where no rice is grown) also outperform their peers in American highschools. And, as it seems, this way of learning seems to produce very few or no outliers, e.g. people who outperform their peers not by a few degrees but like a genius outperforms others. Though their might be other reasons (history, prejudice....) involved in explaining why there are so few East Asian Nobel Laureates.
Conveniently he also does not really discuss brilliant performers which did not have the favourable conditions which maybe a Bill Gates or The Beatles had. Why was Bobby Fischer a brilliant chess player long before he could have clocked the learning hours which Gladwell thinks neccessary for brilliance? And Fischer surely did not have the right background. Srinivasa Ramanujan had a reasonably well protected childhood, but how on earth could he, within one year of encountering formal mathematics, master more mathematics then a typical college student? And this at the age of 11.
So, summed up, this book is fun to read, it is an eye opener of some kind, but the author is far to much in love with his own prejudices and ideas to consider inconvenient facts.
 hypothesis contrary to fact July 22, 2010
Gail Dohrmann (Boulder, CO USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The inclusion of charts, graphs, and lists in Outliers suggests that the book will be scientific in its attempt to show significant factors in the roots or causes of success. Closer examination reveals, however, that many fallacies in reasoning--for example, reasoning from anecdotes, metaphors, and correlations--throw his contentions into question or at least should make the reader question the significance of what he is saying. However the most egregious fallacy is "hypothesis contrary to fact." Although used frequently in informal speech, this device which postulates what might be true if something else had not happened, proves nothing. According to Gladwell, the Beatles would not have been famous if they hadn't had a 10 year period of practice, Bill Gates owes his success to having access to a computer lab when he was in school, the first officer of Korean Airlines plane could have landed the plane if he hadn't shown such deference to the pilot. Or consider," If a million more teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?"
Gladwell seems to have a New Age or pop sensibility in that he favors intuition over logic, is poor in analysis, revels in the irrelevant, is preoccupied with appearances, thinks you can detect lying from facial expressions, exaggerates the role of culture in health, and dismisses logical argument in favor of provoking thought.
Readers thinking about enriching Gladwell even further by buying his book might consult various reviews: Michiko Kakutani and Stephen Pinker (Harvard psychologist) in the New York Times book review, Richard Posner in The New Republic, and Maureen Tkacik in the Nation.
Some of their criticisms: lack of technical grounding in statistics and psychology; occasionally blunders into spectacular failings; interviews experts and comes to banal, obtuse, or flat wrong generalizations; undermines ideals of intelligence in favor of luck, opportunity, intuition; contradicts himself frequently; frequently amazed or flabbergasted like naive observer.
A couple of Gladwell's statements: Hunter gatherers had a pretty leisurely life; everything we've learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course; to build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success with a society that provides advantages for all; the outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all; who we are cannot be separated from where we're from and when we ignore that, planes crash; success is not a random act-- it arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.
In short, Gladwell is a sloppy thinker and his conclusions about success are insignificant--either they're common generalizations or unproven assertions.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 971
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