Outliers Book Review – Stories of Success

Malcolm Gladwell’s ability to take the somewhat obscure patterns of everyday life and bring attention to them in easy to understand language is his true strength as a writer and really as a researcher.

The book Tipping Point (Time Warner Book Group, 2000,2002), Gladwell explains how ideas, trends or social activities become phenomena’s with just an unseen force that he called the tipping point. In Blink (Time Warner Book Group, 2005), he explores how and why decisions are made in the blink of an eye.  

With his new book, Outliers The Story of Success (Little Brown and Company, 2008), Gladwell has developed a theory for why some people are more successful than others. In his research, he found patterns of family history, birthdates, birthplace, and culture contribute to a person’s success.

While in his first two books he took relatively simple concepts and gave them shape, form and force, in Outliers, the book starts out very strong but in the end not all of the research seems to support his theories.

Social Class Makes a Difference in Success

The name of the book is defined in the very first paragraph. Gladwell wrote that an outlier is,”1: something that is situated away from or classified differently from a main or related body 2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from others in the sample”.

He uses the remainder of the book to detail how patterns can be found when comparing individuals in certain groups. Some of the patterns included:

Most successful hockey players are born in the month of January.

After researching athletes, musicians and others, research shows it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.

Successful technology giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen, were born between the years of 1953 and 1955.

The “honor culture” experienced throughout the southern states, especially in the Appalachians, was born out of the ‘Scotch-Irish’ decedents who settled in those areas.

Children who were raised in upper and upper middle classes were more successful in their adult lives than those raised in lower and lower middle class families because of a sense of entitlement.

The Chinese culture can understand math faster and better than other cultures because of working long hours 360 days a year with rice paddies. And, Chinese children learn to count earlier in life because Chinese number words are shorter and easier to repeat than English number words.

A Pattern of Success for Gladwell

While the premise of this book is not as substantiated by the research (I’m still not sure how rice paddies relate to being better at math) as Gladwell’s previous books, some of the research such as the 10,000 to master a skill makes perfect sense.

Gladwell’s storytelling is what makes Outliers worth the read.

The book is available for e-readers in different formats, for example ePub or AZW for the Kindle. As noted in the article “An Introduction to E-book File Formats”, with its own Digital Rights Management structure, AZW protects the e-book publishers and authors from possible piracy.