Staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and the current New York Times #1 Bestseller, Outliers.
Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Others Don’t An outlier is a statistical term for a phenomenon that lies outside of everyday experience that cannot be explained by the normal rules. Malcom zeroes in on people who have achieved over and above what’s normally expected. And he asks one question over and over again: where are they from? What are the kinds of circumstances and backgrounds that have produced these people? He concludes that we have over-emphasized the importance of individual gifts in successful people and underappreciated the role of hidden advantages, like family, environment, and extraordinary opportunities – and just plain luck. He talks about the structure of opportunity and achievement and the role of hard work and cultural legacies in defining expectations about performance and success. He talks about well-known people like Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles, and patterns of success in sports and finance and law, and a host of other fields, with his now-famous flair for eloquence, charm and telling stories that both draw the audience in and illustrate what he is saying. The idea is that there’s always something important and valuable to learn when you look in the right way at these extraordinary histories of outliers. And although Outliers is not a how-to-succeed manual, it does offer some provocative suggestions about how society can help nurture success for everyone.
Comments