The
Outliers - the Story of Success
The
Outliers - the Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
PB AUD32.95
Reading this book is easy because
the facts and arguments are told as stories
of real people and some names you will know
very well, for example The Beatles and Bill
Gates. Gladwell starts with the story of the
Roseto community who in 1892 began immigration
to the US from Italy.
A visit to the Roseto community,
by Stewart Wolf a physician specializing in
digestion and the stomach, in the late 1950's
rocked his medical science paradigm and gave
huge insights into the understanding of health.
Sixty years later Wolf's work provides a platform
for Gladwell to build his thesis on the reasons
for success by individuals.
Gladwell suggests that we ask
the wrong questions in our quest to understand
success. We want to know what they are like,
their personality, their intelligence, their
lifestyle, their special talents as our assumption
is that this is what makes them successful.
His argument is that these personal
explanations of success don't stand up to investigation
and certainly that is true in the case studies
he presents. Each case study supports his view
that we do owe something to parenting, patronage,
culture and time of birth.
Month of birth is a strong predictor
of who will be playing major league hockey in
Canada in any given year. Not because there
is a special feature in a particular month but
because the eligibility cutoff for age-class
hockey is January 1. So a player who turns ten
on January 2 could have a twelve-month physical
maturity advantage over his teammates and therefore
is seen by the selectors as being more coordinated.
With selection comes better coaching, more games,
more practice and more likely to make it into
the big leagues.
Lists of teams from the major
Canadian leagues support the theory with the
same patterns being found in European soccer
and American baseball.
A key factor in someone's success
is that time spent practicing his or her skills.
Gladwell cites many studies that conclude the
magic number of practice hours to become great
is ten thousand.
Bill Gates began programming as
an eighth grader in 1968. A whole series of
opportunities meant that by the time Gates dropped
out of Harvard to begin Microsoft he had been
programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive
years. He was way past the ten thousand hours
and yet was just out of his teen years.
Chapter by chapter Gladwell builds
his case that the real question to ask when
looking at someone's success is "where
are they from?" The stories he uses to
illustrate his points are heart moving, inspiring
and thought provoking.
Make your purchase 
Read
more reviews - March 2009
