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Outliers: The Story of Success Hardcover – Big Book, November 18, 2008
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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.
Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
- Print length309 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateNovember 18, 2008
- Dimensions5.8 x 1.3 x 8.4 inches
- ISBN-100008133786
- ISBN-13978-0316017923
- Lexile measure1080L
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps--Gladwell invites conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential. --Mari Malcolm
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
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Review
"The explosively entertaining Outliers might be Gladwell's best and most useful work yet...There are both brilliant yarns and life lessons here: Outliers is riveting science, self-help, and entertainment, all in one book."―Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly
"No other book I read this year combines such a distinctive prose style with truly thought-provoking content. Gladwell writes with a high degree of dazzle but at the same time remains as clear and direct as even Strunk or White could hope for."―Atlanta Journal Constitution
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Outliers
The Story of Success By Malcolm GladwellLittle, Brown
Copyright © 2008 Malcolm GladwellAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-316-01792-3
Chapter One
Outlier, noun.outlier
\-,li(-#)r\
1 : something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2 : a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
1. Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome, in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine-Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely-clustered two-story stone houses with red tile roofs.
For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. It was a hard life. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment-until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans-ten men and one boy-set sail for New York. They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then they ventured west, ending up finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city in Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy for America, and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one group of Rosetans after another packed up their bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside, connected to Bangor only by a steep, rutted wagon path. They built closely clustered two story stone houses, with slate roofs, on narrow streets running up and down the hillside. They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and named the main street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they soon changed it to something that seemed more appropriate, given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same village in Italy. They called it Roseto.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest-Father Pasquale de Nisco-took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land, and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyard, and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up, making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant-given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians, in those years-that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans: if you wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania, in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian spoken, and not just any Italian but the precise southern, Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto Pennsylvania was its own tiny, self-sufficient world-all but unknown by the society around it-and may well have remained so but for a man named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the stomach, and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent summers at a farm he'd bought in Pennsylvania. His house was not far from Roseto-but that, of course, didn't mean much since Roseto was so much in its own world that you could live one town over and never know much about it. "One of the times when we were up there for the summer-this would have been in the late 1950's, I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society," Wolf said, years later, in an interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having a drink he said, 'You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease.'"
Wolf was skeptical. This was the 1950's, years before the advent of cholesterol lowering drugs, and aggressive prevention of heart disease. Heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart disease. But Wolf was also a man of deep curiosity. If somebody said that there were no heart attacks in Roseto, he wanted to find out whether that was true.
Wolf approached the mayor of Roseto and told him that his town represented a medical mystery. He enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They pored over the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could. They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical histories, and constructed family genealogies. "We got busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study. We started in 1961. The mayor said-all my sisters are going to help you. He had four sisters. He said, 'You can have the town council room.' I said, 'Where are you going to have council meetings?' He said, 'Well, we'll postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us lunch. We had little booths, where we could take blood, do EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer. We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no one under 55 died of a heart attack, or showed any signs of heart disease. For men over 65, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from all causes in Roseto, in fact, was something like thirty or thirty-five percent lower than it should have been.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to every person aged twenty one and over," Bruhn remembers. This had happened more than fifty years ago but Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he remembered what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They didn't have any of those either. These people were dying of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto-a place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.
2. Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held on to some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with lard, instead of the much healthier olive oil they used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt, oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies or onions. Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham and sometimes eggs. Sweets like biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter; now they were eaten all year round. When Wolf had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits, he found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily, and many were struggling with obesity.
If it wasn't diet and exercise, then, what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close knit group, from the same region of Italy, and Wolf next thought was whether they were of a particularly hardy stock that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the United States, to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived. Was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of Eastern Pennsylvania that was good for your health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor, which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns' medical records. For men over 65, the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf slowly realized was that the secret of Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or the region where Roseto was situated. It had to be the Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they began to realize why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited each other, stopping to chat with each other in Italian on the street, or cooking for each other in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to Mass at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2000 people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the town, that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and you'd see three generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where the women worked during the day, while the men worked in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences, where their peers were presenting long rows of data, arrayed in complex charts, and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process, and they talked instead about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to each other on the street and having three generations living under one roof. Living a long life, the conventional wisdom said at the time, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions people made-on what they chose to eat, and how much they chose to exercise, and how effectively they were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of a place.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about their individual choices or actions in isolation. You had to look beyond the individual. You had to understand what culture they were a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town in Italy their family came from. You had to appreciate the idea that community-the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with-has a profound effect on who we are. The value of an outlier was that it forced you to look a little harder and dig little deeper than you normally would to make sense of the world. And if you did, you could learn something from the outlier than could use to help everyone else.
In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Outliersby Malcolm Gladwell Copyright © 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : 0316017922
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; Illustrated edition (November 18, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 309 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0008133786
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316017923
- Lexile measure : 1080L
- Item Weight : 14.6 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.8 x 1.3 x 8.4 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #79,254 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #125 in Business Decision Making
- #254 in Decision-Making & Problem Solving
- #268 in Popular Social Psychology & Interactions
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About the author

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. He is the author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw. Prior to joining The New Yorker, he was a reporter at the Washington Post. Gladwell was born in England and grew up in rural Ontario. He now lives in New York.
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Impressing people without even meaning to is one of the earliest memories I have in life. After devouring all of the chapter and picture books I could get my hands on at pre-school age, my parent's classics and old science textbooks (or at least the ones I could reach off the bottom shelf) seemed the next natural step. Dad frequently retells a story in which he asks me as a toddler how I got to be so smart; I replied "good genes". Public school has no idea what to do with a kid who signs up for kindergarten being already able to read novels, play piano sheet music and execute batch files in DOS. I was tested at age 7 with an IQ of 163 upon entering the second grade, having already been skipped a grade ahead as well as being a year younger still due to having a September birthday. This conflict between being significantly younger than my peers at a critical age of development and also several standard deviations more intelligent than them was to be a continual source of strife. I begged and pleaded with my parents not to hold me back, not understanding the implications of being so much less emotionally mature than my peers. On the first day of class I got sent to the principal's office for taking my shoes off and refusing to put them back on. At 9, the teachers were fed up with me reading or drawing and 'distracting others' in class but also couldn't fail me when I was getting perfect grades, so I was pulled out and sent to a private school for the gifted, where after a year of constant boredom (diagnosed and medicated as ADHD) and other behavioral problems my teachers treated me as a class scapegoat and suggest that I be better off homeschooled or back in public school. These events marked the beginning of a long scholastic career of underachievement, contempt of authority, and befuddled administrators who weren't sure whether I belonged in the gifted program or Special Ed.
I was lucky enough to be born into a white, middle class family in one of the most highly educated and prosperous parts of the United States. My parents were psychology majors who read all the right books and took all the proper steps in terms of nurturing the development of a gifted child without stifling or overloading me. So why am I not in the same percentile of overall life success as I am in test score range? Gladwell goes into the many statistical reasons why the high-IQ child is no more likely to become successful than any other child when demographic influences are controlled for, some factors as completely out of our control as being born in the wrong month of the year. He also gets down to what I believe is the true difference between successful and unsuccessful people, the willingness to work hard. If I had been self-disciplined enough to put in the hours academically to master unfavorable subjects with the same voracity with which I took to computers, art, music and reading, plus a less cynical attitude towards the school system, I might have gotten a full ride scholarship to any of the best universities in the world. As it is, I'll have to settle for a community college degree acquired at age 19, being published and owning my own business by 21, and knowing that if I do desire to learn a new skill at any point in life, the only thing standing in my way is myself. (Though, as a side note, I definitely pick up new skills a lot slower than I used to as a child and find myself stymied more often, indications that my IQ has dropped either from aging or drug/alcohol use, something that I try to compensate for with extra patience).
Though it will always be embarrassing and awkward, I've gotten used to the incredulous stares and people asking "how did you do that", though I never had a particularly good answer. "Lots of practice, the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time, and luck" is the old standby, though it sometimes felt insincere. Now, thanks to 'Outliers', I realize that's not an overly humble explanation of genius. If I ever have kids, I will not subject them to a barrage of tests in order to find out exactly how "special" they are. I will accept that they are special simply on the virtue that they are them, listen to them to find out what they truly love to do and push them to achieve high but realistic expectations. And that's my advice for children of all ages - do what it takes to be whatever you want to be and do the hell out of it.
He argues by anecdote to have you believe that almost all success is due to incredibly hard work. The argument has some substance - an awful lot of success is attributable to tremendously hard work - but it also involves native ability, a fact which Gladwell would wish away. He totally, seemingly wilfully overlooks evidence that doesn't go his way, rather like Stephen Jay Gould a quarter century ago.
He tells us about the 10,000 hour rule for expertise. This theory, which arose in the field of psychology during the 1990s, holds that it takes 10,000 hours of experience to become a bona fide expert. Common sense tells you, but Gladwell does not, that this is a kind of rule of thumb. Also it is a continuum. If you were to listen to a violinist after 9000 hours of practice, and then again after 11,000 hours, the differences would be subtle. Moreover, there are some domains, such as music and certain realms of the law, in which common sense would tell you that practice will lead to this kind of expertise and others where it will not, such as mathematics and theoretical physics. I would recommend that any of Gladwell's readers Google this theory and decide for themselves how applicable it is.
His examples include Bill Gates and Bill Joy working incredibly hard at developing their programming expertise, which Gladwell concludes put them in a position to build Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. He also talks about lawyer Joe Flom of Skadden Arps. Well and good. Gladwell would have you believe that the patterns in coincidences he sees are absolutely compelling. They are interesting, but they are not the whole story. He doesn't tell you what an absolute dilettante Larry Ellison of Oracle was, how he basically wasted his life until he was about 30 doing whatever he pleased. It doesn't tell you about Pierre Omidyar of eBay who had his genius idea, started a company, gave it to a competent manager in Meg Whitman, and stepped back to enjoy it. It doesn't offer a theory about polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Poincare, Swedenborg and others who made contributions to so many fields that they could not have possibly invested 10,000 hours in becoming expert in all of them. He overlooks the fact that Gates' genius was in business even more than programming. The 10,000 hour theory doesn't offer an explanation for math and theoretical physics geniuses whose insights typically start coming to them before the age of 20. In other words, it is interesting but limited. Gladwell doesn't tell you that.
One of Gladwell's major, consistent, beat you over the head themes is that intelligence is not a deciding factor. In making this claim he says that Einstein's IQ was only 150. Excuse me? You don't have to be Einstein to know that's probably wrong. I went to school with kids that smart, and let me tell you, they were no Einsteins. Einstein never took an IQ test, but every Internet source which offered a guess put it in the realm of 160 or above. Gladwell also declines to mention the measured and reported IQs of guys like Warren Buffett, Gates, Joy and Myhrvold, which are astronomical. Instead, he says that anything over maybe 140 is wasted. Absolutely untrue. Being majorly smart is a major advantage in life. Who woudda thunk?
He drags out one certifiable genius who is not a resounding success to make the fairly obvious point that genius isn't everything. He overlooked a second - the Unabomber. These are anecdotes. Gladwell loves anecdotes almost to the exclusion of boring stuff such as statistical justifications.
In another bit of dubious fun with numbers, he lists the 75 richest people of all times, with John D Rockefeller heading the list. Certainly he has experts to cite for this, but even a casual reader will have to concede that an attempt to compare the monetary wealth of Bill Gates and Cleopatra requires a few, ahem, simplifying assumptions. Wealth can be measured a vast number of ways, among them spendable money, real estate, ownership of production, ownership of people, or the ability to direct human labor. Cleopatra didn't exactly spend US dollars circa 2010. In any case, when he discovers that almost 20 percent of his list were born within a nine year period around 1840, you can come to one of two conclusions. Gladwell concludes it is an amazing coincidence. I would suggest maybe it is an amazing list. I will not claim that there is no substance to his argument, but as always, Gladwell is a little bit too breathless, and the list is more than a little bit contrived.
Gladwell argues that vast success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, which certainly does not hurt, but it is not as decisive as he would have you believe. Every age has produced new opportunities, and people who were conspicuously successful in exploiting those opportunities. No mention of Sergei Brin, Andy Grove, Henry J. Kaiser or others whose success doesn't precisely fit his parameters.
He is a supporter of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, as am I. Teaching every child to the extent of his abilities is a great idea. KIPP kids are overwhelmingly from the most disadvantaged sectors of society. Just learning to show up in school, do your work, and be a responsible employee is a tremendous step forward. Gladwell reports that 90% of KIPP alumni go to college, a remarkable number and worth reporting. He is quiet about what happens next, and Googling "KIPP alumni" doesn't reveal any overwhelming successes, despite the fact that the program is approaching 20 years of existence. If most of the kids have jobs, it is a tremendous success. If nobody has started the next Facebook, well, it was an extreme uphill battle even with sponsorship.
Gladwell is a popular writer because he tells the kind of myths that our popular culture wants to believe. He would have us accept that Asians are not as smart as they appear, and ghetto kids are a lot smarter than you would believe. He asks us to think that the things that set them apart are largely cultural. He makes a huge deal out of the difference between wet rice farming and any other way of making a living off the land, then draws major conclusions about the Chinese. Rice farming has made Chinese what they are. What about Indians, Thais, Viets, Indians, Filipinos and others who practice this agrarian art? Didn't work the same for them. Not a mention...
I would advocate that anybody reading this book also go to Gladwell's primary sources. Take a look at "Cultures and Organizations," and perhaps my Amazon review of it which calls into question the strength of the conclusions which the authors draw on the basis of their statistical factor analysis. Read Anders Ericcson's many publications on the 10,000 hours to expertise theory. Take a look at Flynn's work on intelligence, and that of Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn, all three of whom speak highly of each other's work, and whom I have reviewed, and see if you conclude that measured intelligence is unimportant in individuals and/or groups. Examine the statistical analysis performed specifically to control for cultural factors, such as studies of identical twins raised in vastly different cultural settings.
My conclusion is that in almost every case there is some substance to Gladwell's happy tales, but in general they are vastly overstated. He is a good craftsman with a gift for saying what people want to hear. I am sure he will always be successful, and probably continue to be influential beyond the merit of his work. As Gladwell himself would tell you, some people have the good fortune to be born in the right time and place. This is an era that favors diversity, and he is its prophet.
Top reviews from other countries
Outliers ….The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “I am not a self made man” a statement that not only conveys gratitude from the man but also emphasizes the pivotal role of different people in different phases - Bodybuilding, Hollywood and Politics- of his accomplishing career, people who happened to be in Arnold’s life at the right time to provide him with exactly the kind of opportunities he had been looking for. Beyond doubt, he was focused, determined to make an impact and willing to put in efforts that it needed , but the fact that he went on to become the finest Bodybuilder of his time - Total 7 Mr. Olympia titles with 6 consecutively won, and that he had an illustrious Hollywood career and that he had been the most loved and one of the most successful US Governors of all time is not because of his determination, drive and diligence alone. Talent and Success work together only up to a point , but beyond that threshold success becomes largely a function of the environment a person grows in and the opportunities- People related, and circumstances related - he / she is presented with.
In a world 🌍where we pretend Success is exclusively a function of individual merit, Outliers provides a breathtakingly fresh perspective on Success.
It is a non-negotiable read for everyone :
🔗An aspiring teenager who is raring to start college and who seeks inspiration from his / her peers . What their success should really mean to him ? and exactly what should he/ she be inspired by ?
🔗A working professional who swears by his skills and thinks what has gotten him/her this far will take him further and
🔗Parents who want to do everything possible in their capacity for their child’s bright future. This book will pose a difficult question for them - Are they doing enough? And their quest for finding an answer will reveal what no amount of education can - Cumulative advantages and opportunities that are inherent in the culture you grew and your child is growing have a subtle yet profound impact in your child’s success.
Outliers is a compelling work that will positively alter your perspective on Success. From analyzing the lives of Geniuses, Iconic Businessmen and Cultural influences To analyzing Plane crashes, Asian’s supremacy on Mathematics and Importance of consistent efforts over quick fixes, Outliers will leave you convinced that we are not self made individuals; In fact Nobody is !
All of us - in that order - are
♐️ Products of the World 🌍 in which we grew up
♐️ Successful because of several opportunities -in terms of People, Situations and Life’s experiences- that we have had and will continue to have
♐️ Are aware about a clear relationship between efforts and rewards. That we have seen our efforts produce results and recognition in the right measure motivates us to work with persistence and doggedness.
Outliers cannot be recommended enough
Reviewed in India on August 27, 2023
Outliers ….The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said “I am not a self made man” a statement that not only conveys gratitude from the man but also emphasizes the pivotal role of different people in different phases - Bodybuilding, Hollywood and Politics- of his accomplishing career, people who happened to be in Arnold’s life at the right time to provide him with exactly the kind of opportunities he had been looking for. Beyond doubt, he was focused, determined to make an impact and willing to put in efforts that it needed , but the fact that he went on to become the finest Bodybuilder of his time - Total 7 Mr. Olympia titles with 6 consecutively won, and that he had an illustrious Hollywood career and that he had been the most loved and one of the most successful US Governors of all time is not because of his determination, drive and diligence alone. Talent and Success work together only up to a point , but beyond that threshold success becomes largely a function of the environment a person grows in and the opportunities- People related, and circumstances related - he / she is presented with.
In a world 🌍where we pretend Success is exclusively a function of individual merit, Outliers provides a breathtakingly fresh perspective on Success.
It is a non-negotiable read for everyone :
🔗An aspiring teenager who is raring to start college and who seeks inspiration from his / her peers . What their success should really mean to him ? and exactly what should he/ she be inspired by ?
🔗A working professional who swears by his skills and thinks what has gotten him/her this far will take him further and
🔗Parents who want to do everything possible in their capacity for their child’s bright future. This book will pose a difficult question for them - Are they doing enough? And their quest for finding an answer will reveal what no amount of education can - Cumulative advantages and opportunities that are inherent in the culture you grew and your child is growing have a subtle yet profound impact in your child’s success.
Outliers is a compelling work that will positively alter your perspective on Success. From analyzing the lives of Geniuses, Iconic Businessmen and Cultural influences To analyzing Plane crashes, Asian’s supremacy on Mathematics and Importance of consistent efforts over quick fixes, Outliers will leave you convinced that we are not self made individuals; In fact Nobody is !
All of us - in that order - are
♐️ Products of the World 🌍 in which we grew up
♐️ Successful because of several opportunities -in terms of People, Situations and Life’s experiences- that we have had and will continue to have
♐️ Are aware about a clear relationship between efforts and rewards. That we have seen our efforts produce results and recognition in the right measure motivates us to work with persistence and doggedness.
Outliers cannot be recommended enough
Reviewed in India on November 29, 2023


















