Outliers: The Story of Success

• (3/5) Entertaining but not Science, March 16, 2010
  by Mary Bast, amazon.com
  

  Very interesting and well-written. Gladwell is smart, and makes this sound like real science but I wonder about his interpretation of statistics. Also, understanding what makes pilots successful will not necessarily encourage you to fly... well, not with certain airlines.

• Cultural critic Malcolm Gladwell applies his best trend watching insights and peripatetic methodology to the biq question of why some people achieve success and others do not. These Outliers, as he calls them--successful people who stand out from the rest of the crowd--may be business people, artists, athletes, entertainers, scientists, or work in other fields. In a variation of the nature versus nurture debates, Gladwell seeks answers in culture, environment, and upbringing. Without seeking simple formulas, he examines a range of artifacts--IQ tests, for example, and birth-date data--as he digs for answers in a book that draws on psychology, business, and sociology, and which explains difficult concepts in an accessible manner.
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  THE OUTLIERS confirms that Malcolm Gladwell, here a public intellectual, is himself an Outlier.
  
  
  
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• In OUTLIERS, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it al by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
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  It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are FROM that we unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
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• "Buoyed by two runaway bestsellers, BLINK and THE TIPPING POINT, Gladwell has positioned himself as a roving ambassador between cultural and corporate America, penetrating boardrooms and living rooms, providing bullet points for cocktail parties and management seminars, and changing not just the things we talk about but the way we talk about them."
• "Malcolm Gladwell has a rare ability: he can transform academic research into engaging fables spotlighting real people. His new book...is beautifully written."
• Identifies the qualities of successful people, posing theories about the cultural, family, and idiosyncratic factors that shape high achievers, in a resource that covers such topics as the secrets of software billionaires and why the Beatles earned their fame.
• The best-selling author of Blink identifies the qualities of successful people, posing theories about the cultural, family, and idiosyncratic factors that shape high achievers, in a resource that covers such topics as the secrets of software billionaires, why certain cultures are associated with better academic performance, and why the Beatles earned their fame.
• In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
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  Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
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• In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers" -- the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
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  Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

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This book appears on the following bestseller lists:

#2 on Amazon.com Non-Fiction
#1 on Amazon.com Business and Investing
#8 on Best Book Buys Top 100