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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:  203 reviews
Sales Rank: 7
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.5 x 1.2
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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| Customer Reviews: Read 198 more reviews...
 An interesting look at what gets success November 18, 2008
Preston Barrett
231 out of 277 found this review helpful
In this wide-ranging third installment of Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of how people and social phenomena work, the New Yorker journalist takes a close look at what constitutes high levels of success. That is, what makes people at the top of their respective fields get there? As we've come to expect from Gladwell's previous books, the answer to the question is a bit complicated.
He says that upbringing, culture and even random luck have something to with success, but there is another important quality that anyone can control. Two chapters are dedicated to the "revelation" that IQ is only a baseline quality and success has little to nothing to do with having a high IQ or a low IQ. Rather, success is substantially a product of cultivating a high degree of what Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence" or what most refer to as "emotional intelligence."
Gladwell uses the example of Nobel laureates coming from unknown schools as often as ivy league schools. At this level of mastery IQ is no longer a factor. Success has little to do with where you were educated and everything to do with your level of practical/emotional intelligence and willingness to put in the 10,000 hours of practice required to reach mastery of your field.
All in all, it's an interesting read that isn't too heady and goes by pretty quickly, as the interesting anecdotes are what you would expect from Gladwell.
Another book on the topic that I strongly recommend because it has been really helpful to me in actually applying what Gladwell teaches in my own life (for my own success!) is The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book.
Magnificent and Very Important December 30, 2008
Irfan A. Alvi (Towson, MD USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
In my opinion, Gladwell has done a magnificent job with this book, and the ideas presented are enormously important for anyone interested in success in just about any field of endeavor.
His basic thesis is as follows:
1. Inborn ability matters relatively little in many fields. In some fields like science it matters more, but only in the sense that one needs a minimum threshold of ability (eg, IQ of at least 120); above that threshold, extra ability doesn't matter much. [In predominantly creative fields like the compositional arts (as opposed to "mere" artistic performance like playing music composed by someone else), I suspect that inborn creative ability matters a lot, but standard measures like IQ may not reflect that ability.]
2. In pretty much all fields, focused hard work is necessary to develop expertise, and generally about 10,000 hours need to be invested to reach the expert level. But being an expert isn't the same as achieving the standout success of an "outlier" (eg, Bill Gates, Will Smith, or Barack Obama).
3. Luck plays a large role in success. Bad luck can dramatically inhibit success, and good luck fosters success. Exceptionally good luck (eg, a long series of lucky circumstances) is needed to achieve success at the outlier level. Luck clearly interacts with the first two factors noted above -- inborn ability involves rolling the genetic dice, and having the opportunity to put in one's 10,000 hours also involves luck (eg, poor kids aren't likely to have access to computer centers, violin lessons, and professional coaches). Being immersed in a culture which fosters success in a particular field is also a matter of luck, along with being born at the "right" time within that culture. But of course "luck" doesn't have to be entirely random, since it can be influenced by deliberately changing one's circumstances, exposures, networks, etc. ("Chance favors the prepared mind" - Pasteur); for example, if you live in Idaho and want to get into the music business, consider relocating to a more "happening" locale.
The particular strength of Gladwell's book is that he's a great writer with outlier-level ability for storytelling. Some reviewers have criticized his book for lack of originality, but Gladwell deserves credit and success for bringing these important ideas to a large general audience in a gripping and compelling way. And he certainly doesn't claim that he came up with these ideas all by himself.
Some reviewers have also criticized Gladwell for not adequately grounding his ideas in published research and for thereby cherry-picking data and arguing with straw men. That's a somewhat odd criticism, since it contradicts the criticism of lack of originality. Moreover, there are several good books available which describe the research critics might be looking for, such as the following:
- Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin is an excellent book which overlaps considerably with Gladwell's book. The main difference is that Colvin puts greater emphasis on hard work ("deliberate practice") whereas Gladwell emphasizes luck more, so one could say that Colvin is more focused on expertise whereas Gladwell is more focused on going beyond expertise to the outlier level.
- Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist by Dean Keith Simonton is another excellent book which focuses specifically on creativity (and success) within science. The book reads like a PhD thesis and is quite rigorous in its use of careful reasoning, empirical data, and quantitative analysis. In a sophisticated way, Simonton provides strong support for Gladwell's ideas, and he ultimately argues that chance (luck) is the dominant factor in scientific creativity and success, while also recognizing the supporting roles of genius (inborn ability), zeitgeist (culture), and logic (basic knowledge of one's scientific domain and its rules of inference, which comes from hard work, perhaps again involving roughly 10,000 hours invested in education and training). Simonton also emphasizes that a scientist's chance of coming up with important results is directly related to total output (eg, number of papers published), so that ties chance to continued hard work after already becoming an expert (eg, obtaining a PhD).
- The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a fascinating and provocative book which, coming from a different angle, also argues for the role of unforseeable luck (positive "black swans") in producing outlier-level success, with negative black swans having the opposite effect.
In summary, I believe Gladwell has a done a great service in presenting very important ideas related to success in a user-friendly way, and I think the evidence (in his book and beyond) provides strong support for his ideas.
Very highly recommended -- indeed, a must read, especially for parents.
Outliers, the concept December 19, 2008
Donald E. Dupuis
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
I think this book is just great. The basic premise is interesting, it is well argued, and well written. Is it an exhaustive treatment of the subject - no. It is a highly entertaining and provocative introduction.
If you think the universe is fair, or ought to be, you are not going to like this book. If you are interested in why some succeed whereas others - just as smart, just as hardworking and maybe more so, do not do so well - then this is a book for you.
I particularly loved his bits about the transported Italian town in Pennsylvania, about airplane crashes, and why it is hard to expect our school children to successfully compete with Japanese school children on standardized international tests when we go to school 180 short days a year and they go to school 240 long days a year.
If this is your field of expertise - you are not going to like this book, it is too thin on material - but as an introduction to this way to thinking about the world it is a book I highly recommend. Incidentally, the subtitle for this book could be It Takes a Village to Raise a Child - at least if you want them to succeed.
Do you have outliers working for you? November 21, 2008
Samantha Bartlett
24 out of 32 found this review helpful
This new book from Malcolm Gladwell will make executives think twice before they cut budgets on training that improves employee's skills. Malcolm shows us that the greatest talents can be developed, and this is certainly true in corporate America. As he says in Outliers, talent should be "thought about as something a company develops, rather than something that is `acquired'. He goes on to say that the most skilled individuals in a profession are made and not born.
Ability, according to Gladwell, is just one factor in success. He points to research that suggests that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
Practice does make perfect. The greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians and scientists emerge only after spending at least three hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field. This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
Outliers: The Story of Success suggests the importance of investing in communicating company mission, culture and skills. "Look around Wall Street, or what's left of it today," he says, "and you'll see lots and lots and lots of people from Goldman Sachs. That's not a coincidence. It's because they took their mission to invest in people seriously."
Gladwell argues that the state of today's economy is the perfect time to invest in talent development. "When it's easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent. Now, you're forced to." I couldn't agree more. Outliers is a great book and a fun read.
Another book (in the same style Gladwell uses in Outliers) that is also outstanding and I strongly recommend is The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All
Fun book on a different idea December 7, 2008
magellan (Santa Clara, CA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
For me, reading Gladwell's latest book was truly an example of Yogi Berra's famous quote, "It was deja vu all over again." Thirty years ago as a young psychology master's and then doctoral student, I used to (tactfully) argue with my professors that wealth, social standing and its attendant advantages, and just random good luck--were more important factors for success in life than the much vaunted influence of I.Q.--or even social intelligence itself, as Daniel Goleman argued many years later in his now famous and important book.
I pointed out that talent and genius often go unrewarded, and that a mediocre man who gets the right breaks, or simply persists and refuses to give up, can succeed where the more talented but less sedulous would give up and fail. Studies such as the famous one by Getzels and Jackson on creativity, which found that students who scored high on creativity with I.Q.s averaging 120 did as well in school as less creative students with average I.Q.s of 140, demonstrated that indeed I.Q. isn't everything.
I also argued, correctly, I believe, that even even minor negative events and bad luck in one's life tend to compound and magnify their effects more than positive events do. Why this is so I don't know, but once the positive momentum in an individual's life was lost, time and time again I saw them enter a downward spiral that was very difficult to reverse and recover from--regardless of the reasons for it--whether financial or career-related, health-related, relationship-related, or whatever.
And in my own experience, I saw people who I regarded as far more talented than I languish in obscurity, while on the other hand I saw those I thought less talented than I prosper, mostly for reasons that had more to do with random chance, or perhaps just being in the right place at the right time, than any objective qualifications or abilities.
So for me, this book was simply a long awaited confirmation of ideas and theories I'd had many years ago (and had long since abandoned and gone on to other things, since I realized my approach to psychology probably wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I became an engineer instead. :-)
I had also maintained that once one reaches an I.Q. of 120, social intelligence is more important to success in life than pure I.Q. Unless one wants to become a theoretical physicist or something, an I.Q. of 120 is enough to do anything in life, and further I.Q. points aren't so important as other qualities. As I mentioned, the Getzels and Jackson study supported this idea. In that sense, I do agree with Goleman that social intelligence is extremely important. And in the last 30 years, the evidence from neuorobiology has underscored the baleful importance of the limbic system, that truly nefarious part of our brain which underlies and controls our most powerful emotions, drives, and motivations, both good and evil. More than any other part of the brain, the limbic system is responsible for humans too often living down to their lowest and most primitive impulses and instincts instead of their higher natures and abilities.
If we look at the sad state of our society, and of the world in general, it is the unchecked power of the limbic system that has landed the world in its present sorry and precarious state. It is why we as humans fail to preserve what is good, to fight evil, to protect the weak and the sick, to promote a fair and just society, or even to get along with those whose ideas merely differ from ours.
As a unified theory of success, though, I doubt Gladwell's ideas will attract many supporters. For one thing, psychology has a vested interest in maintaining that a human's greater behavioral plasticity and ability to learn compared to other animals has always been the key to our success both as individuals and as a species. After all, psychologists would basically be out of jobs if if could be proven that lady luck or social circumstances matter more than other personality factors. If that were true, it would be better to focus academic research on social engineering ideas for creating a happier and better society, along with the economic and political capital to implement those ideas, rather than on the classical psychology of the individual itself, which is the current paradigm in psychology.
So for me Gladwell's book was more than a bit of an epiphany. Overall, it's a well written, well-documented, and fascinating book, in which Gladwell, with his usual concise and clear style, presents the evidence for a different theory of success in life which runs contrary to the whole western approach in psychology for almost the last 100 years.
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