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  • Outliers: The Story of Success
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Outliers: The Story of Success

Outliers: The Story of Success

byMalcolm Gladwell
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Top positive review

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Brian
5.0 out of 5 starsA Great Book to Change Your Perspective on Success
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 2, 2023
This was a book I picked up after reading a political book that I just finished about mens issues. It was referenced and it was to my curiosity to see what it was all about since the main topic of discussion was success. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

With that being said, this was one of the best books that I have ever read about outliers. The whole purpose of this book is to redefine the way we view success. Success is not only due sheer effort and hard work as we hear from most success stories, but it also due to the sheer amount of opportunities that people had. Whether it be out of pure luck or due to their cultural roots.

The author does a great job in proving those two points with the sheer amount of examples and stories that he provides. Not only providing us with accurate scientific information, but also making it enjoyable and easier for most people to pick up. I was engaged in every story that he told and was fascinated to see how he broke down all the details that he needed to prove his point. From stories about the tech era, to the airline industries and so much more. To even feel sympathy for some of the people in these stories and saw all of all these things that happened in these people lives, whether they became outliers or not came into fruition. I was engaged in it all.

This is one of the books that you probably thought to yourself when you see two people of the same caliber and think to yourself why aren't they both successful. Why did only one of them become an outlier while the other didn't even knowing they both skilled at whatever profession they are in (same profession to be exact). This book not only aligned with the idea with the idea that I had about success, but proved it even more. Showing that some opportunities that are given to you is the biggest factor when it comes to being successful. Being there are the right the time or just simply someone giving you the helping hand that is needed.

This is a perfect book in my eyes and I would highly recommend this to all.
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Top critical review

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Graham H. Seibert
1.0 out of 5 starsLiars, outliers, and out and out liars
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 25, 2011
And then there's just plain exaggeration to tell a good story and court the intellectual fashions of the day, which are Gladwell's faults. He goes to interesting sources such as Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations, biographies out of Silicon Valley, or Richard Flynn's work on intelligence, or the remarkable KIPP schools, and takes highly selected and anecdotal evidence to tell amazing yarns and breathe new life into hopes for equality which have remained unfilled for decades.

He argues by anecdote to have you believe that almost all success is due to incredibly hard work. The argument has some substance - an awful lot of success is attributable to tremendously hard work - but it also involves native ability, a fact which Gladwell would wish away. He totally, seemingly wilfully overlooks evidence that doesn't go his way, rather like Stephen Jay Gould a quarter century ago.

He tells us about the 10,000 hour rule for expertise. This theory, which arose in the field of psychology during the 1990s, holds that it takes 10,000 hours of experience to become a bona fide expert. Common sense tells you, but Gladwell does not, that this is a kind of rule of thumb. Also it is a continuum. If you were to listen to a violinist after 9000 hours of practice, and then again after 11,000 hours, the differences would be subtle. Moreover, there are some domains, such as music and certain realms of the law, in which common sense would tell you that practice will lead to this kind of expertise and others where it will not, such as mathematics and theoretical physics. I would recommend that any of Gladwell's readers Google this theory and decide for themselves how applicable it is.

His examples include Bill Gates and Bill Joy working incredibly hard at developing their programming expertise, which Gladwell concludes put them in a position to build Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. He also talks about lawyer Joe Flom of Skadden Arps. Well and good. Gladwell would have you believe that the patterns in coincidences he sees are absolutely compelling. They are interesting, but they are not the whole story. He doesn't tell you what an absolute dilettante Larry Ellison of Oracle was, how he basically wasted his life until he was about 30 doing whatever he pleased. It doesn't tell you about Pierre Omidyar of eBay who had his genius idea, started a company, gave it to a competent manager in Meg Whitman, and stepped back to enjoy it. It doesn't offer a theory about polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Poincare, Swedenborg and others who made contributions to so many fields that they could not have possibly invested 10,000 hours in becoming expert in all of them. He overlooks the fact that Gates' genius was in business even more than programming. The 10,000 hour theory doesn't offer an explanation for math and theoretical physics geniuses whose insights typically start coming to them before the age of 20. In other words, it is interesting but limited. Gladwell doesn't tell you that.

One of Gladwell's major, consistent, beat you over the head themes is that intelligence is not a deciding factor. In making this claim he says that Einstein's IQ was only 150. Excuse me? You don't have to be Einstein to know that's probably wrong. I went to school with kids that smart, and let me tell you, they were no Einsteins. Einstein never took an IQ test, but every Internet source which offered a guess put it in the realm of 160 or above. Gladwell also declines to mention the measured and reported IQs of guys like Warren Buffett, Gates, Joy and Myhrvold, which are astronomical. Instead, he says that anything over maybe 140 is wasted. Absolutely untrue. Being majorly smart is a major advantage in life. Who woudda thunk?

He drags out one certifiable genius who is not a resounding success to make the fairly obvious point that genius isn't everything. He overlooked a second - the Unabomber. These are anecdotes. Gladwell loves anecdotes almost to the exclusion of boring stuff such as statistical justifications.

In another bit of dubious fun with numbers, he lists the 75 richest people of all times, with John D Rockefeller heading the list. Certainly he has experts to cite for this, but even a casual reader will have to concede that an attempt to compare the monetary wealth of Bill Gates and Cleopatra requires a few, ahem, simplifying assumptions. Wealth can be measured a vast number of ways, among them spendable money, real estate, ownership of production, ownership of people, or the ability to direct human labor. Cleopatra didn't exactly spend US dollars circa 2010. In any case, when he discovers that almost 20 percent of his list were born within a nine year period around 1840, you can come to one of two conclusions. Gladwell concludes it is an amazing coincidence. I would suggest maybe it is an amazing list. I will not claim that there is no substance to his argument, but as always, Gladwell is a little bit too breathless, and the list is more than a little bit contrived.

Gladwell argues that vast success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, which certainly does not hurt, but it is not as decisive as he would have you believe. Every age has produced new opportunities, and people who were conspicuously successful in exploiting those opportunities. No mention of Sergei Brin, Andy Grove, Henry J. Kaiser or others whose success doesn't precisely fit his parameters.

He is a supporter of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, as am I. Teaching every child to the extent of his abilities is a great idea. KIPP kids are overwhelmingly from the most disadvantaged sectors of society. Just learning to show up in school, do your work, and be a responsible employee is a tremendous step forward. Gladwell reports that 90% of KIPP alumni go to college, a remarkable number and worth reporting. He is quiet about what happens next, and Googling "KIPP alumni" doesn't reveal any overwhelming successes, despite the fact that the program is approaching 20 years of existence. If most of the kids have jobs, it is a tremendous success. If nobody has started the next Facebook, well, it was an extreme uphill battle even with sponsorship.

Gladwell is a popular writer because he tells the kind of myths that our popular culture wants to believe. He would have us accept that Asians are not as smart as they appear, and ghetto kids are a lot smarter than you would believe. He asks us to think that the things that set them apart are largely cultural. He makes a huge deal out of the difference between wet rice farming and any other way of making a living off the land, then draws major conclusions about the Chinese. Rice farming has made Chinese what they are. What about Indians, Thais, Viets, Indians, Filipinos and others who practice this agrarian art? Didn't work the same for them. Not a mention...

I would advocate that anybody reading this book also go to Gladwell's primary sources. Take a look at "Cultures and Organizations," and perhaps my Amazon review of it which calls into question the strength of the conclusions which the authors draw on the basis of their statistical factor analysis. Read Anders Ericcson's many publications on the 10,000 hours to expertise theory. Take a look at Flynn's work on intelligence, and that of Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn, all three of whom speak highly of each other's work, and whom I have reviewed, and see if you conclude that measured intelligence is unimportant in individuals and/or groups. Examine the statistical analysis performed specifically to control for cultural factors, such as studies of identical twins raised in vastly different cultural settings.

My conclusion is that in almost every case there is some substance to Gladwell's happy tales, but in general they are vastly overstated. He is a good craftsman with a gift for saying what people want to hear. I am sure he will always be successful, and probably continue to be influential beyond the merit of his work. As Gladwell himself would tell you, some people have the good fortune to be born in the right time and place. This is an era that favors diversity, and he is its prophet.
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From the United States

Felix O. Hartmann
3.0 out of 5 stars A people pleaser for the masses
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2016
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I usually love all the books I read since I am very selective. However this was a let down for a number of reasons:
1. While it started off strongly, it rapidly fell off in all aspects about a third in. The writing was less to the point, the points were less groundbreaking, and seemed to be supported by rather anecdotal observations. It had a comeback here and there, but the majority of the book as weak imo.
2. Overdone storytelling. About 1/5th of the book is spent on a chapter on plane crashes. He makes a very smart and interesting point, but that point was made after about 30 minutes, yet he kept going bringing example after example in excruciating detail. This is closely related to point 1 as it appears that as substance decreased, the exposition of description increased.
3. His stance is too extreme. If the tale of the self made man is one extreme, then outliers is the other extreme as it basically attempts to discredit the successful and say it was all due to luck. He keeps mentioning Bill Gates and how "lucky" he was to have a computer in his school. He also mentions that there were only a handful of school at the time to have such a computer. Well a handful of schools say 12? With say 1000 students on average each? That means 12,000 others had the same chance as him. 12,000 that did not program all night long, to learn this new skill, but rather chose to play ball or worry about boys/girls. While we can discredit everyone by the logic of "if X did not happen, he would not have accomplished Y", the truth is this Malcolm: We are around so much opportunity, more so now than ever, that it's less a question of whether there is opportunity, nut whether we take advantage of it. You are correct that now I'd have a harder time creating my own operating system, that ship has sailed, I agree, but that is looking at success with a very narrow lense. There is always an opportune industry for one to break into, and all it takes is seizing those opportunities. As with your mother, you mention in the Epilogue, if it were not for someone having given her money to go to school, things would have been very different. Don't you think that is selling her short? I'm sure she would have kept asking until she found someone else to give her money.
The true story of success is that successful people will not let their story be changed by adding or removing a variable from their path, they will keep fighting and find something to replace that variable. That's why some of the most successful people have been declined or faced defeat (be it investors, agents, etc.) over a hundred times and kept going. If you'd go back and take away their investor, its safe to say they would have kept going to another 100 and eventually found someone else. And that attitude, as you may claim, is not a stone cold result of legacy, as both those born of a privileged background as well as those with the most painful of pasts have those attitudes... because an attitude is decided in the moment, not something we are born with or given.

In conclusion, it is an interesting read if you want to learn more about people, but take it with a grain of salt. This is NOT personal development, or anything of the sort in case you think this is a book I read and learn to be successful... quite contrary the message appears to comfort those that don't have success and blame society, and poke those with success implying that whatever they have was not earned.
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Todeco
3.0 out of 5 stars An ok book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 10, 2021
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I am a bit disappointed with this book. Yes, the examples of different successful people with their background like where they are coming from, their family, teachers, opportunities, the time they were lucky to be born on so on explains how they got where they got, BUT what about other people who weren’t so lucky to be born at the right time and in the right place (like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates 1995 or hockey players who were born mostly January to March who had the luck to make it in life understandably through hard work and tears of course) but who also had the very opportunities not like millions of others. What does this book offers for the regular people less lucky to be born in the right year or go to the best school or being able to read Shakespear at the age of 4? It is very repetitive with different stories of different successful people, that’s all. It goes same scenario other and other. Got to the half of the book and trying to hang on till the end of it, but from reading the names of the next chapters, the same routine is awaiting for me ahead which does not give me much motivation to finish it. I admit, the book does explain the hard work and passion people put into achieving their goals but I did not intend to buy the book to read people’s biographies. Seems like if you weren’t smart and special at the young age nothing special and great awaits for you in adulthood, just an ordinary life. Hmm does that sound inspiring? Not to me.

PS: I learned about the 10.000 hours you have to put into certain carrier in order to master it well. Or why there is so many Jewish people in New York City who are lawyers or the reason why they own so many clothing companies. Also learned about why plains fall and how to grow great rice lol and about the easy and great linguistic structure Chinese people have which explains their way of easy learning and the way to a higher IQ.

Too much going around the circle with these stories, wanted and expected much more of this book.
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Scott J Pearson
3.0 out of 5 stars Good read, but does not challenge the foundations
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 15, 2019
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Being an outlier means being a non-conformist. One hears this kind of advice all the time. So many people buy into conventions that they forget the reasons behind the conventions.

Gladwell seeks to critique the standard story of an outlier’s success. As normally told, outliers start doing there own thing; they work really hard and persevere; then in the end, they end up successful while all the world is envious of them; their story is one of individualism. Gladwell seeks to bring to light that while this may be true, there are social structures at work helping the person along.

“No man [or woman] is an island,” wrote John Donne in the sixteenth century. Such is still true today, Gladwell admonishes us. We are the products of how our environments shape us. In order to succeed, we do not need to be different; instead, we need to grasp to make the most of the opportunities presented to us. He illustrates his point through telling interesting stories about topics as varied as hockey players’ birthdays, computer technology, slavery in Jamaica, and the interaction of ethnicity and plane crashes. These stories show what he means by the fact that we are all dependent on social supports to some degree. Success is not just a choice of the will; it is the product of a society.

Some, particularly in America, might be defensive about their own individualism while reading Malcolm’s writing. We must be clear that Malcolm is not saying that individual choices and personality play no role. What he is saying is that society plays a role, too. We must pay attention to one’s culture and to plain luck as well.

This book is an interesting read for leaders. It is not a sociological study and does not contain a depth of academic rigor. It seeks to inspire mainly by story and anecdote. It’s a good reminder to get our minds off of ourselves and our personalities and onto things that really help out the people next door, in the next cubicle, or in the next suburb or town.
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Jennifer P
3.0 out of 5 stars meh
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 17, 2020
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3-3.5stars out of 5 stars. Gladwell sets his premise on the idea that “self-made” stars/high performers are less “self-made” and more a mix of hard work, many hours, and ethnic and cultural legacies. While he does bring up good considerations on how we view success, I feel some of his arguments fall short in their rigor. For example, he correlates work ethic to cultivate rice with Asian (actually mainly East Asian but he doesn’t make that distinction from most other Asian countries/cultures) but his attempts to turn it into a causation fall short despite his insistence that there is a causal relationship. If anything, many of his chapters feel so focused on ethnicity that they miss the stronger point about one’s environment. Since the initial release of this book (2008), there has been excellent discussion in 10,000 hour rule, grit, mastery, etc that bear consideration for the modern reader. His discussion on education focuses too much on time spent vs standardized test scores without touching on what benefits (social, soft skills, etc) are built outside the classroom. In terms of writing style, I felt that he was at times long winded before making his connections and don’t understand how others have called this book “explosively entertaining.” In term of book design, the paperback has a nice matte feel and comfortably pliable, creamy pages that open nicely and are easy on the eyes. The white book cover is nice until I accidentally pet my dogs dirty head and get noticeable smudges afterwards. Given all the rave reviews and how influential this book has purportedly been, I wasn’t expecting to feel so meh about it.
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Phoenix9
3.0 out of 5 stars A Good "Eye Opener" but Gladwell Goes to Far
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 13, 2016
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Outliers, like many of Gladwells other books, starts with a rather simply idea and supports it through various stories. In this case the idea that Gladwell promotes is that massive success, such as that achieved by Bill Gates or The Beatles, occurs not primarily from hard work or raw talent but rather from a "patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages.” Gladwell weighs luck above all other criteria in any success story.

What Gladwell is saying is absolutely true to a certain extent. Many events occur in our lives that are often not under our control and those events can have massive ripple effects throughout our lives. Our place and time of birth, who are parents are, the people we encounter along the way etc. So it's not hard to come to the conclusion that Gladwell did that achieving success has a large element of luck involved.

However the same framework that Gladwell applies to success stories can be applied to quite literally anything in life. Steve Jobs said it best in his Stanford Commencement speech "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward". You can look at the history of a rapist, or of the evolution of a species or any events over a series of time and make conclusions like "if this didn't happen then this wouldn't have happened. So x must be true."

The point I'm trying to make is that luck, yes straight up dumb luck, is a fundamental factor in how any series of events unfold. Heck all of us come from a literally unbroken line of ancestors and the odds of that occurring are almost zero. However it seems that Gladwell is assigning to much weight to luck. For example look at someone like Elon Musk. He's a serial entrepreneur who founded many multibillion dollar companies. Change some factors and maybe things would have turned out differently, but he would likely still be successful.

I feel outliers is a great "eye opener" for those who are naive to think that luck plays no role or a small role in success. If you walk away realizing that luck does play a significant role then you've taken a good message from this book. Perhaps you'll become more humble as well. But be careful in overweighting the importance of luck. It is clearly not the only factor in success or anything else in life.
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S. Maughan
3.0 out of 5 stars **DANGEROUS** (But Rivetting)!!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 28, 2013
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Gladwell is a good writer, a really good writer. You'll find yourself glued to the prose as he masterfully tells his stories. But for me the book can be summed up by answering this simple question, "who is most likely to be successful, a child born in Indonesia or one born to a wealthy family in Connecticut"? The answer is obvious, yet the whole book is built around this point. Gladwell claims most success can be explained by digging into the successful person's past. You will, according to Gladwell, find a string of opportunities provided to the successful, all of which "made them successful". Obama must have read Outlier before making his "you didn't build your business" speech. And for me this is where is starts to get dangerous. Once you can say the money earned by the successful is not as a result of their own endeavors, you can easily make the logical jump and say they don't have the exclusive right to the rewards of their success. Surely the successful need to "share their success". Gladwell doesn't say this explicitly in the book but any intelligent reader can see this as the path the argument is taking (and surely one picked up by the Liberals). This is simply anti-individualism - it's determinism.

Gladwell also introduces his idea of the "10000 hours required for mastery of any skill". It's an interesting idea and Gladwell argues it well. This seems to imply hard work is required to succeed, contradicting the ideas of determinism. To get around this Gladwell argues the successful people profiled in the book were all "given the **opportunity** for 10000 hours of practice". In doing so he once again shifts the emphasis to the "opportunity" and away from the hard work.

So what's missing? For me it's "choice". Sure, we all have opportunities which we encounter all through life. Some of these we pursue, others we choose to ignore. We do not live deterministic lives. Our background and genetic makeup are neither necessary for success nor sufficient for success.

I enjoyed reading Outlier and would recommend it as a great read. But don't be suckered into thinking you're a victim of your childhood and your ancestors - you're not! Those things may provide more, or less, opportunities; but in the end you have to make the most of the opportunities which do present themselves (usually in the form of hard work!) and you have to choose who you want to be!!
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Janis Grummitt
3.0 out of 5 stars Read the first few chapters
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 10, 2012
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The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I meant to read this book years ago, but I'm glad I did. I like books that change my perspective on the world and Gladwell's books always do that! This book challenges the basis on which we judge outliers - those who stand out as brilliant -our heroes.

In the first few chapters, his message is summed up by the sentence ` ...success is the result of accumulated advantage. Success is less impacted by personal ability than by social rules.' As a culture, we love to ascribe heroic attributes to others. Gladwell claims that the myth of `rags to riches through hard work and magic `are false. Other people, cultural expectations and circumstances are most likely to turn raw potential into heroes or outliers. Hard work and focus is also a requirement of brilliance; 10,000 hours or 10 years of practice on average. Mastery is the result of relentless passion and focus in practice. Some critics disagree with this figure, but I have no doubt it is pretty close - it correlates with a great many other research articles I have read over the past few years. It also matches my personal experience.

I admit I only picked up this one main story - but many books don't even give you that - just pages of information and research. Sadly, Gladwell didn't seem to research his story too well; many reviewers have pointed to specific failings of fact, such as the birth dates of hockey players. However, taking all of the evidence as a whole, rather than specific instances, I feel that his `angle' is supportable and should change the way we view greatness.

Unfortunately, after an exciting start, I found the last few chapters repetitive and off track. Instead of reinforcing the original point with more and more evidence, I think there is a great deal of mileage in suggesting ways that we could all develop our potential by manipulating our thoughts and situations. I think there is a danger that people reading this book might assume all is in the hands of fate (circumstances like birth dates) or our personal connections. In fact, it shows that very little of our potential is genetic and that personal and circumstantial factors are much more important. That is an important message for us all because it is one we can influence.

As always, Gladwell tells a good story and this one is worth reading at least for the first few chapters.
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Nadia C.
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Points But Overly Broad Assertions & Racist Postulations
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2013
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I'm an attorney and all the entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs I know have read this book so I wanted to see what the fuss was all about it.

Gladwell is a good writer, he must have put in his 10,000 hours, and the book is engaging and informative, a fast read.

I won't repeat what everyone else has said in this forum, but I will say that I found numerous statements of his book to cast too wide a swath to be accurate and in doing so, are also racist, specifically against Asians and frankly I am tired of mass media being sanguine about casting racist statements against Asians but being super sensitive, almost obsequious, when it comes to statements made about other races.

For example, the title of one of his chapters is "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" and explores and attempts to validate the racist theory that "Asians are good at math" [I'm Asian, I'm smart but I've never been good at math] and how an alleged economy based on rice [Gladwell mixes agrarian South Chinese culture with all other Asian cultures which is racist - nobody tells an Argentinian that his cultural background is the same as a Mexican farmer's and vice-versa] created an entire army of Asians who feel compelled to work like racehorses and which explains why they prospered in low-tier service industries in the United States. RACIST and just stupid.

How would African Americans feel if he wrote a chapter entitled "Picking Cotton and Basketball"? About how African Americans have never really excelled in academics but rather in physically based activities like sports and blue-collar trades because that's how the "African American culture" developed? That sounds dumb and racist, right? That's exactly how his chapter on "Asians" is set up. Which is too bad, his disingenuousness in this chapter really undercut the validity of the rest of his book and he does have some other, thoughtful points. I was excited about reading some of his other books but there are so many really good, inspirational books out there, I will not be wasting my time any more on Gladwell.
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josh casillas
3.0 out of 5 stars Easy read; not many actionable takeaways
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 27, 2019
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I read this book over the course of several weeks and found it engaging and entertaining - very anecdote heavy. Does not delve deep into scientific/research theories of success, with exception of Hofstede's cultural elements, which tbh are pretty widely known already. Toward the end, the author waxes eloquent explaining why the cultural values springing from Chinese farming are very much superior to the values springing from "Western" style farming. I understand what he's getting at, and it holds water to some extent. But the whole point of the book is to explain outliers - people who are extroadinarily successful, particularly in business. Frankly, in modern history the percentage of outliers (richest, most influential people worldwide) coming from China is significantly lower than the percentage of outliers coming from the US. Chinese students score significantly higher on tests than US students, particularly in math - but does that make them outliers?

Ultimately, the book's main flaw is its lack of actionable takeways. I came away with a slight motivational "buzz" which I often experience after reading anecedote-rich self-help literature. I think I also understand the need for educational reform in the US on a deeper level. I'll also be more empathetic toward those who are not successful, for much is out of their control; and not worship those who achieve success, for they owe much to "lucky breaks" and their family/culture/educational environments.
But ultimately, what steps should I take to become an outlier? How can I become the next Bill Gates or Barak Obama? . . .this book didn't really say
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GF
3.0 out of 5 stars OUTLIERS OUTLINE
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2008
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I'm a big Malcolm Gladwell fan. I think his research and writing skills are sublime; however, in Outliers, a book about about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary, he gets carried away.

While his objective was to have Outliers do for our understanding of success, what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health (closely examining personal choices or actions in isolation by looking beyond the individual), he delves far too deep in his supporting content to make a point (e.g. The Three Lessons Of Joe Flom and especially The Ethinic Theory of Plane Crashes).

Unlike The Tipping Point, one has to sift through Outliers to find the extractable and relevant content that can be applied to your life. This is not say that it isn't there; Malcolm Gladwell always delivers in that regard, but in this book the delivery is slow in comparison to his previous works.

Some of the book highlights include information on divergence and convergence tests; backgrounds of Bill Joy and Bill Gates; Lewis Terman's Termites; Annette Lareau's concerted cultivation and intensive scheduling; Robert Sternberg's practical intelligence; accumulated advantages; the reasons why students from Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan score in the ninety-eighth percentile in math in comparison to other Western industrialized nations that rank between twenty-six and thirty-six; and the 10,000 hour rule. These topics alone make this book worth having, but you could probably conduct independent research on your own via Google to get in-depth information on these people and subjects.

The message of Outliers - in the words of Malcolm Gladwell - is that people don't rise from nothing. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The cultures we belong to, the legacies we were passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways that we can not imagine. No one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

Ironically, that's why I purchased Outliers; I wanted my favorite researcher to expand upon the ingredients of success in ways that I could not imagine. In the end, Malcolm Gladwell's sprawling thoughts are enlightening and sometimes inspiring, but overall it lacks the coherence and impact that normally characterize his books.
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