Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Genre: Popular Science
Pages (words): 309 (N/A)
Readability: N/A
Rating (out of 5 stars): ***1/2
Reviewed by: Ben
Description: Following up on the success of The Tipping Point and Blink, Gladwell's third book explores just what makes some people extraordinarily successful. He examines the stories of professional athletes, rock stars, and millionaires and looks for key moments in their lives when they got their chance to make it big, and how those opportunities came about. In the end, he relates this to our lives and thinks about what we might do to promote even more success stories.
Thoughts: I like to read Gladwell's books. He basically tells a bunch of stories and summarizes a bunch of research and tries to tell a coherent story throughout it all. He does a great job of finding and summarizing the studies and stories (they're all fascinating), but at times I think he falls a bit short in being able to pull it all together in to one big theme,. Outliers was no exception to this, but overall it's probably my favorite of the three big ones he's written. And, I think that for the most part he makes good points. The main one, and I'm probably not giving too much away here, is that people become extremely successful not because they are that much better than everyone else, but because they had an opportunity that most other people never had and they made the most of it. That's something that I truly believe. I also especially liked the portion near the end of the book about how one's culture can really define what a person excels at, despite whatever talents they were naturally born with. To whet your appetite, he claims that the Chinese are generally good at math mainly because of the culture they grew up in, and especially because of the language they speak. And I actually buy his argument. Anyway, it was a fun little book, it gave me a lot to think about, and I enjoyed reading it.
Disclaimer: I think there were a few swear words in this book, but nothing too major.
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