“This is a book about outliers, men and
women who do things that are out of the
ordinary. I’m going to introduce you to one
kind of outlier after another: to geniuses,
business tycoons, rock stars, and software
programmers. In examining the lives of the
remarkable among us, I will argue that there
is something profoundly wrong with the way
we make sense of success...
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe
something to parentage and patronage… It
makes a difference where and when we grew
up. The culture we belong to and the
legacies passed down by our forbears shape
the patterns of our achievement in ways we
cannot begin to imagine.
It’s not enough to ask what successful
people are like, in other words. It is only
by asking where they are from that we
can unravel the logic behind who succeeds
and who doesn’t.”
Why are so many major league baseball
players born in the Fall, and so many pro
hockey players born during the Winter? What
do the Beatles and Bill Gates have in
common? Why do Asians generally excel in
mathematics? Why isn’t IQ a reliable
predictor of achievement?
These are some of the intriguing questions
answered in Outliers, the latest examination
of human idiosyncrasies by the New Yorker
Magazine’s Malcolm Gladwell whose previous
two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, were
both #1 best sellers as well. Gladwell, the
son of a British engineer and a Jamaican
psychotherapist, has a knack for researching
arcane subjects and breaking down his
surprising findings into readily-digested
layman terms. What’s more, he has an
engaging writing style which turns the most
mundane topic into a fascinating curiosity.
In Outliers, his quest was to probe the
secrets to success. Conventional wisdom
attributes extraordinary achievement to some
combination of intelligence, luck and a good
work ethic. But Gladwell uncovered some
bizarre explanations for why many manage to
make it to the top of their chosen
professions.
For example, since little league hockey
players are grouped by the calendar year in
which they were born, those with birthdays
in January, February and March enjoy an
undeserved advantage just because they’re a
little older than the rest of the
competitors in their age group. This leads
to their being preferred by coaches and thus
enjoying more playing time, simply by virtue
of their being more mature. Over the course
of a childhood, the extra attention
translates into a maximized potential, hence
the preponderance of pros born during the
calendar year’s first quarter.
Other novel chapters assess phenomena
ranging from a “town in eastern Pennsylvania
where no one has ever had a heart attack” to
the connection between pilots’ cultures and
plane crash rates to why 10,000 hours of
practice are needed to master a skill to why
there is little difference between geniuses
with I.Q.s of 150 and 200. Overall, Outliers
is a compelling page-turner which often
reads like an edge of your seat mystery
thriller, even though the information
ultimately unearthed by the author isn’t
guaranteed to improve your odds of joining
the elite class which has so captured his
imagination here.