Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" took me about a quick 2 hours of reading. If you start with a pre-conceived scientific notions or some prejudiced views about people who succeed in life of what he talks about in this book, you will be disappointed. However, I am pretty impressed with how the author conveyed the central message to his readers. The entire book is written to convince the reader (and I often held some skepticism when I read something due to my academic training) that when we draw lessons from success stories out there, we often start with the individual's personality traits and not have an holistic picture of the environment and circumstances that made the individual successful. In some sense, I am wondering if he is trying to put the position that nurture is more important than nature in the pursuit of success of the individual.
In a very quick introduction chapter, Gladwell started with the definition of an outlier being (i) something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body or (ii) a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. If you have read Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan", you will see similar shades in this book, except that the other book deal the occurrence of highly improbable events and this one deals with why only a few people achieves success and many others don't.
Malcolm Gladwell introduces outliers using stories of music prodigies, computer programmers, successful businessmen and case studies of pilots and Asian being good at math throughout this book. The theme for the first few chapters is "Opportunity" followed by the theme "Legacy" for the last few chapters. The first theme of opportunity attempts to argue that "success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages" - your parentage, the environment, the circumstances that the individual utilizes and become successful. The second theme of the book relates the impact of cultural legacies that have deep roots and long lives on the successful people. It uses the cases of ethnic theory on plane crashes and why Asian are so good at mathematics looking at the Chinese and American population.
In the first theme of the book, his explanation goes in the following order. He will start the story with how you conceive this successful story and show you another side of the story about the same person with the environment and circumstances that gave the individual the hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities to succeed. The word to describe his approach in this book is holistic or in his own words, he used the analogy of biologists describing the ecology of an organism or organisms within an environment.
Interestingly, one of the most interesting chapters of the book entitled "The Trouble with Geniuses", where he compared two geniuses and how by virtue of different environments, one succeed and the other don't. Although anecdotal, I can't help but not think that the environment where the social class and the parentage have an impact on shaping people to be successful or not. I do not think that the book is out to promote the Matthew effect, where the rich gets richer and the poor gets poorer. It is more to examine the reasons on why some people with great potential or talent for success may fail to live up to expectations.
In some sense, this book is ideal for parents thinking about how to shape the environment to educate their children for a better future or to be a success story. Nevertheless, it is worth a short read over a boring Saturday weekend for me.
Related Links:
Malcolm Gladwell's homepage for Outliers.
Hope that you're fine Bernard. My Outlier came last week but I was more distracted by the latest D&D book of rules on martial power to get started on it so thanks for the review.
You might wish to key in "Zimbardo Time Paradox" on Google to pick up a book on temporal perspectives. Its a fairly good description of success as well.
Turns out that one point of IQ is worth about $425 USD of annual income. It's a little over-rated considering that recessionary times is great to pick up income generating stocks.
I can see many non-graduates accumulating an IQ of 180+ by the time they are in their mid-thirties compared to their colleagues these days.
Posted by: Christopher Ng Wai Chung | November 24, 2008 at 09:46 AM