If you liked Blink and The Tipping Point, you’ll probably like Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, too. I picked up my copy from the library and since it’s a popular item, it only had a 7-day loan period. Luckily it read fast!
In Outliers, Gladwell tries to explain the root causes of success. His examples include youth sports leagues, musical prodigies, software billionaires, New York lawyers, airplane pilots, and more. Using such wide a breadth of success-samples, he breaks down each story into a series of surprising building blocks that ultimately determined the person’s success.
Gladwell wants to dispel the myths of the self-made man and the rags-to-riches stories we all love to read. I think we like these stories because they promote the proud hard-working individualism America is known for. But the truth is there is always more than meets the eye in these stories, and Gladwell pulls back the curtain for us all to see.
Work ethic and IQ are indeed important, but only to a certain point. They are your ticket-to-ride so to speak. Beyond that, an array of external, “community” factors play a large role in determining success. For example, I had no excuse not to do well in school. One reason was that I was born at the start of the school year, giving me almost a full year developmental head-start over some of my classmates. (In Washington, the cutoff was Sept. 1st.) Bryn –with her August birthday– was the true Outlier, achieving academic success in spite of her early disadvantage.
Other “community” factors included social-economic status, cultural legacy, and sometimes just random dumb-luck. Gladwell argues that while Bill Gates is a very intelligent and talented software entrepreneur, a series of random, lucky events helped put him at the top of the Forbes richest-person list. To find out what those events were, and dozens of other interesting tidbits of sociology and success, I recommend reading Outliers for yourself.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: success
