Outliers: The story of success by Malcolm Gladwell

I just finished reading Outliers: The Story of Success and recommend to anyone who is interested in the theories behind success and achievement. It’s surprising how much time it took for me to buy the book and read, given my interest in this area.

Anyway, I completed it just 15 minutes back and enjoyed it thoroughly.

The author, who has earlier written equally interesting books - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference has a unique gift of studying and understanding complex advanced research in psychology, human behaviour, social phenomena and related areas, mix it with history and then present it in a very interesting, slowing, story-like manner. Where those researches would have been individual, boring pieces of content, this author simply takes those ingredients and mix them into a highly readable, interesting and insightful book.

Outliers is no different.

While The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference was a book about social epidemics and how products, prople and ideas reach a tipping point when they become unstoppable. It talked about the kind of people who spread social epidemics. In Outliers, he offers the explanation behind individual success. Gladwell took the cases of Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, America’s smartest man with an IQ of 195 and serveal others known adn unknown people, schools and communities and his own family and ancestral line to illustrate that:

1. Success is not just about 100% individual achievement, rather a number of opportunities and lucky breaks contribute to it in addition to hard work, great ethic and capability to grab an opportunity.
2. Adequate IQ (good but not necessarily the highest) is good enough to succeed. Someone with good enough IQ but with access to other opportunities such as the right family background makes the difference between a success and a failure. On the other hand, geniuses with lack of opportunity are known to see their gift withered away.
3. Success is hard work: 10,000 hours seems to be a basic condition to become an expert. If you have done your 10,000 hours of work and find yourself in the right place at the right opportunity, then you are a success. This is what happened with an entire generation of successful American industrial entreprenurs who were placed at the right time and the right age in 1860s to 1870s when the American economy boomed. That’s why an all-time list of wealthiest people has a disproportionate number of people who were from a single country and who made their fortune in a narrow band of 20 years. Similarly, the personal computer revolution of early 1980s saw people in the band of mid-1950s take advantage of being at the right place with the right skills.
4. Cultural legacy is a major factor in how people behave and can explain plane crashes (cockpit conversations and dynamics within and out with the traffic controllers are deeply affected by legacy) to crime and so much more.

These are just four of the ideas out of so much more. This is a thoroughly enjoyable book. If you read my blog regularly, then this book will interest you immensely. Ask for Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell and you’d be glad you read it.