Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Outliers
Summary: 5 Stars
Outliers: The Story of Success [AUDIOBOOK] [UNABRIDGED]
Give a copy of this book to every coach who has influence over your young child's future.
If you are a curious parent who wants to get answers about your child's probabilities of achieving high-success in a sport, such as ice hockey, this book answers the mail. While ice hockey is not the main subject, Gladwell at least touches on the sport sufficiently enough to provide most if not all of the answers needed to understand why "the system" causes a fair share of potential future super stars to get left behind and HOW some of those children can overcome the odds against high success and overcome the doubts of a peer group of other parents, players and coaches. This peer group of Southern California ice hockey parents and hockey program managers is one of the most ignorant imaginable. We are the parents of a child who was left behind, held back, whose birth date was less than ideal, and whose physical development was two years behind the others. Genes make a difference, a child's ability to ignore it all and keep his eyes on the prize can help break out of the pack at a later age (if the family is willing to sacrifice enormously. The talent gap can be closed in two years of 24/7 training, but it can take $70,000+ and moving away from home to get there. Gladwell makes sense of it all and distills this situation to science with explanations of how timing and some luck can play into it. We are now satisfied and are appreciative of the data and its meaning, after years of not understanding. We can further distill it down to this. If you are a hockey parent of a young boy who is being left behind, and that boy truly has an insatiable self-driven appetite to be the best at this sport, and his brain has the demonstrated capacity to perform at high levels, and the family gene-pool suggests that the child will be a late developer, do not despair, the child can break out against all odds. However, the system is entirely against such a situation and it will take an almost super-human effort putting your lives on hold to support such a quest. If this is your situation, there is hope and it can happen. I am thinking of contributing as an author to a chapter in a similar book of one child's road to success, all the speed bumps along the way, the personalities who had the power to help but looked away, and are probably hiding in shame today, and program rules that are stacked in some's favor and heavily against others. But for this to be a dramatic turnaround, we are waiting to see if he really makes it to the top rung. Then I guarantee a most interesting reading of a rags to riches story that is mainstream Gladwell, but takes the story to another level.
Book Review: Good, but not as good as "The Tipping Point" or "Blink"
Summary: 5 Stars
Outliers is an excellent book about some of the often overlooked factors that drive success. He investigates factors other than the personal meritocratic view of success. You may not agree with all of his conclusions, but the book does help bring to your attention factors that may not always be taken into account.
Malcolm Gladwell argues through a variety of stories that structural factors often drive who becomes a success - who becomes an "outlier." For example, Canadian superstar hockey players are often born in the first three months of the year. They often rise to the top because they are the most physically mature of their peers and thus get selected for extra training and better leagues and this intense training that occurs over years helps these players rise to the top of the sport of hockey.
Mr. Gladwell also shows how the year in which a person is born also determines in certain cases the persons chance for success. This is often driven by demographic troughs in which there are fewer people competing to get into elite institutions. He also discusses Jewish immigrants and their experience in the New York garment district, New York City lawyers, and also a small town in Pennsylvania in which heart disease is virtually non-existent, among other examples of cases in which structural factors dominate over our conventional views of personal success or accomplishment.
He also discusses experts and expert performance and how it usually takes 10,000 hours for a person to become a true expert. He ties early selection of young people for "gifted" and other programs and how how such early selection earmarks the person for additional learning, training, etc. enabling them to achieve the 10,000 hours of "practice" needed to become an expert.
If you are interested in understanding community, sociology, personal success, structural anthropology, or are just interested in learning generally, this is an excellent book. It provides excellent insights into how factors that we have neglected to take into account of our analysis of "success" and what drives people or allows people to become very successful or to become an expert or other "outlier." Just like Mr. Gladwell's other books "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" which became best sellers, this book brings to the forefront of our understanding new concepts that we may not have been aware of and thus is a welcome addition to our public discussion and debate about structuring institutions, providing people with "second chances" for selection, and other opportunities for "corrected" individual selection these institutions should undertake to select from a larger pool of people. I highly recommend this book.
Book Review: "We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit."
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell's "Outlier" is a thought-provoking and entertaining analysis in which the author explores why certain people fall outside the norms of human behavior and achievement. For example, how did Bill Gates became a superstar in his field while other equally talented and intelligent men and women failed to reach their potential?
Gladwell is a marvelous storyteller who opens with an intriguing description of the Italian village of Roseto, where "virtually no one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack," and where the death rate was remarkably lower than expected. Fifty years ago, a physician conducted a study to determine whether Rosetans followed a strict diet or exercised vigorously. There had to be some explanation for their unusual good health. Why was this town an "outlier," "a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply?" The study's findings demonstrate that in order to understand outliers, we have to look at a number of diverse factors.
The author contends that a whole host of elements may come into play, such as one's date of birth, cultural milieu, religious background, and economic advantages. To some extent, everyone, no matter how gifted, is a product of his or her environment, upbringing, and opportunities. Those who achieve success often profit from a special combination of ability, determination, hard work, and luck. Otherwise, they might be destined to muddle along like the rest of us average folk.
"Outlier" is not just about success. It is also about spectacular failure, such as the horrendous crashes that for a time made Korean Air a pariah in aviation circles. Why, between 1988 and 1998, did this airline have a "loss rate" seventeen times higher than United Airlines? To understand this, we have to analyze how "cultural legacies" exert their own power throughout the generations.
"Success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages." Gladwell shares his personal history that, he believes, partly explains his own attainments. He discusses how having the right forbears plus a bit of serendipity has made all the difference in the trajectory of his life. It is easy to dismiss "Outliers" as another glib take on matters that anyone with common sense could figure out for himself, such as: It helps to be in the right place at the right time; hard work pays off; without a big break, most men and women are destined to toil in obscurity. However, Gladwell is far from simplistic. In detailed and reflective chapters filled with insightful observations, he encourages us to see the big picture that all too often is missed when we cling to our preconceived notions.
Book Review: The lucky circumstances behind success stories
Summary: 5 Stars
Outliers, in statistics, are results that are so extreme that they are generally not taken into account in calculations. So extreme that they are literally off the charts. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success is about people that experience this kind of extreme success. People like the most succesful hockey and soccer players. People like Bill Gates. Or the Beatles. What is it that makes people so succesful?
First, it is hard work. To become an expert in a field, one needs at least about 10,000 hours of labor. Like an Asian farmer toiling away on his rice paddy field. The proverbial 99% transpiration that comes with the 1% inspiration.
Second, it is lucky circumstances. Sheer luck. Like being born at the beginning of the year instead of at the end (which makes a surprisingly significant difference in your chances of becoming a top hockey player). Or the country you're from. Or the language you've been raised in (English gives you an early math disadvantage of about a year compared to Chinese or Japanese).
In his previous bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Gladwell shows that small initial differences can make for a huge end effect on a society. Also his Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking was about conclusions we all draw from small differences in quick thought processes. In the same way, this book shows how sometimes incredibly small differences can tip somebody towards extreme success.
Small differences also made for the success of Malcolm Gladwell himself. One of the most precious gifts he allegedly got from his father is the memory of "seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy". The same joyous work ethic oozes from the pages of this book.
Gladwell reads like a detective. He brings you science like a professional storyteller. The science, on the other hand, sometimes suffers a bit from this high readability (some conclusions about cultural causes are quite debatable). There are no footnotes in this book, but in the back of the publication, each chapter does have a number of notes to back up some of his claims.
This book is definitely an entertaining read. It is also a good way to weapon yourself against the abundance of success stories that sound a tad too good to be a full version of the truth.
Book Review: Outliers is Truly Eye Opening
Summary: 5 Stars
Having just read a number of negative book reviews of Outliers from major publications, particularly Alex Beam of the International Herald Tribune who cites a number of other nay sayers, I have to conclude that the criticism is largely just sour grapes by less successful writers. Malcolm Gladwell bravely takes on large, complex topics and looks at them from a unique angle. In Outliers Gladwell focuses on success and the role that luck, timing, genius, culture, socioeconomics and hard work among other aspects play. Because his writing style is simple and elegant and he is able to communicate effectively to the masses, other writers have accused Gladwell of being short on substance. But this is hardly the case.
Without going into every detail of his book, which I think other Amazon reviewers have done very well, I will simply say that Gladwell has done the world a great service by popularizing a theory that quantifies what it takes to become an expert at anything: "the 10,000 Hour Rule." This idea is truly revolutionary; that through prolonged study amounting to 10,000 hours in any field from music, using the example of the Beatles, to computer programming, tracing back Bill Gates personal history all the way to childhood, one can become an expert. For all the parents out there who want the best for their kids, this is also a revelation. As Gladwell rightly points out, 10,000 hours really is a considerable amount of time to focus on any one field. But it clearly can pay off.
The one thing I question about the idea of "the 10,000 Hour Rule" is that it does take a special type of intelligence and focus to be able to zero in on a specific field of study for that amount of time. I believe for most children and adults it would be impossible for them to focus for this prerequisite length of time. They just don't have it in them or they get distracted by other interests. The star pianist discovers boys at age 13 and gives up playing, or whatever. In the U.S. educational system there is also an emphasis on avoiding becoming a one dimensional automoton and the best universities emphasize looking for multidimensional people. So this is the main problem I have with Outliers.
However, in summary, I think Outliers is a fantastic read and I highly recommend it. It will make you consider our world in a whole new light. I have read all of Gladwell's books and look forward with much anticipation to his next work. For all those people out there that say Malcolm Gladwell is just stating the obvious in Outliers, why not just spend the time and effort writing something smarter?