"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?
Malcolm GladwellHis 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."
This brief review accompanies Gladwell’s book display on Amazon.com. The reviewer is not identified—his/her name not shared with us. As I write this comment Gladwell's illuminating discourse is now, not new—published as it was in 2008. It’s actually had a full decade of life. The claims made above however, retain their validity as much today as they did upon the book’s original publication!
Gladwell writes well. His prose clear and informative, he couples this skill with surprising twists as for instance when he proclaims in Epilogue ‘A Jamaican Story’, [page 270]: “That is the story of my mother’s path to success—and it isn’t true.” He’d omitted to tell in his brief narrative, of his “ . . . mother’s many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.” In what then follows he weaves a powerful historically authentic short story about the benefits of being of light complexion in the Jamaica of his mother’s upbringing.
In the process he relies, in part, on (1) Orlando Patterson’s work on the significant differences between Jamaican plantation society in which sugar embodied factories-in-the-field as opposed to cotton that allowed no room for ‘industrial’ or artisans' occupations; (2) Trevor Bernard’s “Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World” and (3) Fernando Henriques “Colour Values in Jamaican Society”.
Introduced in Chapter 2, Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule coupled with unique opportunity, goes a long way in explaining the meteoric rise to popularity of the Beatles, the software achievements of Bill Joy among others and I daresay, his own success as a writer having spent his ‘apprenticeship’ at the Washington Post from 1987 until 1996 when he joined The New Yorker. Indeed, he says of himself: "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end. It took 10 years—exactly that long."
Enjoy the ofttimes counter-intuitive notions you’ll find in this discourse on outliers.
