Connect
Sponsors
Currently Reading
My first romance novel!Terms
The Book Lady's Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Reviews and articles posted here are property of The Book Lady's Blog and are not to be posted elsewhere without permission. Please contact me if you wish to post any of my work, or any excerpt thereof, in any other location or format.
Books and Blogs
Miscellaneous
Technical Stuff
Design Credits
Nov
13
Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
2008 at 3pm Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Date of publication: November 18, 2008
Americans love stories about the American dream and the individuals who overcome poverty and disadvantage to defy the odds and make a way for themselves. We love to think that anyone can become successful and that we all have the same opportunities and an equal chance of succeeding if we just work hard enough. It makes for great TV, but that’s not the way things really work, at least, according to Malcolm Gladwell.
In Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell, author of bestsellers The Tipping Point and Blink, turns his creative analytical eye to the way we think about and explain success. He basically says that everything we think is wrong, and he makes a compelling case.
Gladwell opens the book with a story about a group of immigrants from the Italian village of Roseto, who, when they settled in America, recreated their community and had remarkably positive results. Researchers were astonished to discover that residents of the new Roseto had a death rate from heart disease that was half that of the United States as a whole and a death rate from all causes that was 30 to 35 percent lower than expected. They had no suicides, no substance abuse or addiction problems, and very little crime. No one was on welfare, and no one was stressed out to the point of having ulcers. Something unusual was going on. Roseto was an outlier.
Gladwell uses this example to make the point that in explaining a person’s or group’s success, we cannot just look at who the people are; we must look at where they are from. We must understand their community and their circumstances—most important, we must understand the unique opportunities available to them—in order to understand why they succeed. Rags to riches stories and tales of self-made men are inspiring, but Gladwell contends that
People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parent and patronage…It makes a difference where and we grew up….It’s not enough to ask what people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.
The next section moves on to explore the importance of opportunity and the seemingly arbitrary standards that affect who becomes successful. An analysis of Canada’s top hockey players reveals that birthdate, more than any other factor, determines which teams and eventually which opportunities and what type of training players receive. They must have innate talent, but that is not the primary factor in determining whether they succeed or fail. Gladwell explores the arbitrary nature of success and states that we should adjust the way we organize things because “the systems we set up to determine who gets ahead aren’t particularly efficient.” He notes that though “we could easily take control of the machinery of achievement” to create more equal and fair opportunities, we don’t because
We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.
Gladwell moves on to analyze popular and less well known rags-to-riches stories and contends that even when an individual rises from poverty to become successful, he does so through a unique set of circumstances and opportunities in which what appear to be disadvantages are actually benefits. His argument essentially boils down to this:
The outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage.
Gladwell understands that readers may not like the sound of this. Many of us want to believe that all we have to do is be determined and work hard, and why wouldn’t we want to believe that? It’s warm and fuzzy and encouraging, and it makes us feel like we are in total control of our lives. Gladwell lays out his argument one step at a time and provides real-life stories and illustrations along the way to make his point cogent and persuasive. He does, however, note that it’s not all about luck.
The successful are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.
After he examines community and local circumstances, Gladwell explores the ways in which cultures impact individuals’ chances of success, and he takes the case of Asians’ success with mathematics as one powerful example. His findings are surprising, and they make a lot of sense.
I found Outliers to be an enjoyable, entertaining, and thoroughly educational read. I really liked Gladwell’s two previous books, and this one follows a very similar layout. He states from page one what he plans to argue, and then he does so in an orderly and sensible fashion, in which each chapter builds logically upon the one that came before it.
Gladwell provides extensive examples, and though they are useful, they do become a bit repetitive. I have occasionally felt like his work would be better suited for long magazine articles than full-length books because he makes his point very clearly and provides strong evidence, and the examples can begin to feel a bit tedious. Nonetheless, this is an interesting read that provides a unique and rarely expressed perspective on success, and I think Gladwell makes very useful and insightful suggestions about how this information could (or should) be used to change our society and the way we think about success.
Outliers is a quick, edifying read that I recommend to anyone who enjoys examining social phenomena and looking at the world through a new lens. It would also make a great gift for someone who enjoyed Gladwell’s other work or who enjoys applying math to real-life situations, as in books like Freakonomics. I’ll be recommending this one to friends and customers alike. 4.5 out of 5.
I can’t wait to read this one!
Rebecca, how would you rate *Outliers,* comparing it to *The Tipping Point* and *Blink*?
I loved *The Tipping Point* and felt it gave me a lot of info that I could take with me (and, among other things, label my friends as “connectors” or “mavens”, etc.)
*Blink* was full of interesting tidbits, but I didn’t learn anything from it. It felt more like a collection of fun facts …
I’m interested in *Outliers* (and I’m one of those who loved *Freakanomics*), where does it fall on my Malcolm Gladwell scale?
Hello – Enjoyed the review, but read our dissenting review here:
http://abbeville.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/malcolm-gladwell-is-wrong/
The main flaw in Gladwell’s theory is that it has no predictive power. He takes case examples of successful people/groups, enumerates the advantages and opportunities they’ve enjoyed, and tells a neat “just so” story about their having succeeded as a result of those opportunities. This is easy to do because hindsight is 20/20–also because no one is willing to sit through the 10,000 stories of people/groups who enjoyed very similar opportunities, worked just as hard, and did NOT become the best of the best. So what truly separates the outliers from the rest? Innate ability: precisely what Gladwell argues is not the “salient fact” about them.
For one quick example: take those junior hockey players. Assume they’re from Canada (obviously an advantage because Canada invests a lot in cultivating this kind of talent). Now take the half of the group that, as Gladwell points out, is helped by having a birthdate in the first half of the year. Now take the subset of that group that will benefit from good coaching, good teams, a strong work ethic, the financial ability to keep playing the sport, etc. This still works out to be a pretty large group, in Canada! Now, all else being equal, how do you predict which of THAT group will go on to become Wayne Gretzy or Mario Lemieux? Well, you’d have to look at speed, strength, dexterity…in other words, innate ability, plain and simple. That’s what truly makes them outliers, and that’s where Gladwell’s argument fails.
Thanks for sharing another perspective, abbeville. That’s always welcome here, and it adds an interesting dimension to the discussion.
[...] on tonight’s Colbert Report on Comedy Central, and you won’t want to miss it. Read my review of Outliers, and be sure to visit Gladwell’s website for more information. Come back tomorrow [...]
“Innate ability: precisely what Gladwell argues is not the “salient fact” about them.”
Indeed, for instance in terms of Asian success at mathematics (when you look at averages, as opposed to individuals) this is predicted by psychometric tests where Asians consistently score above average on the non-verbal component. This has also been shown in transracial adoption studies, which suggests the disparity is not purely cultural.
Outliers is really a great book. The problem is Gladwell leaves little room for critical thinking by interlacing his opinion and ideas throughout the book. I like to form my own thoughts based on research. But I think for the target this was a great book.
I wish I’d been born at the right time and had 10k hours of practice at doing something. Maybe blogging will help my writing skills.
http://www.paunchiness.com/i-finished-outliers-last-night/
[...] was OK. I’m not going to do a review on the book…check out these great book reviews for more info on the [...]
[...] Rebecca at The Book Lady’s Blog Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)fanaticismDo It Now!!!Celtic Trail Journal: Travel Days -1 and 0Play or pay – are you handicapping your child? [...]
[...] Weblog | S. Krishna’s Books | Gimme More Books! | The Book Lady’s Blog | Book Addiction | She Is Too Fond of Books | Redlady’s Reading Room | Islandhopper Lives It [...]
I dig the premises of the other books this author’s put out. And, he has a knack for writing for the masses, which is probably why he’s on the NYT Bestsellers list so often (what with mechanics like “Or are they?”–dun, dun, dun!). You would’ve certainly have heard of this guy if you listen to NPR at a