The coaches then tend to label the bigger, more focused players the better ones, when in fact what they are is older. At nine or ten years of age, several months can make a noticeable difference in a child’s size and coordination. Canadian youth hockey leagues base a player’s eligibility on the calendar year, so skaters born on January 1 play with boys with December birthdays. A close look at the rosters of top Canadian hockey teams reveals an oddly disproportionate number of players born in the first three months of the year. This proves true of even the most seemingly merit-based pursuits, says Gladwell. “Nor is success simply the sum of decisions and efforts we make on our behalf.” The success of “outliers”-his word for exceptional men and women like Franklin-is a “gift.” And that gift can be institutional, familial, generational, and ultimately cultural.
“It is not the brightest who succeed,” he observes. In Outliers, which has already joined its predecessors The Tipping Point and Blink in the august perch atop the bestseller lists, Malcolm Gladwell wants to explode this worldview. Franklin was the country’s first self-help guru, dispensing pithy advice to readers in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. This sunny tradition goes back to Benjamin Franklin, who rose from nothing to become a leading scientific figure, reformer, and national founder-a man “who lived to stand before Kings, and died to leave a name which the world will never forget,” as Robert Winthrop once said. Visit a Barnes & Noble business section and the titles leap out: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Think and Grow Rich, Success Is Not an Accident, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and thousands more. 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.īrilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.Why do people succeed? Americans like to think the formula is a simple one: Work hard, show good judgment, and you can achieve extraordinary things, especially if you have some innate talent. 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.
He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
In this stunning 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. Explore what sets high achievers apart-f rom Bill Gates to the Beatles- in this seminal work from "a singular talent" ( New York Times Book Review) Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Blink and The Bomber Mafia and host of the podcast Revisionist History
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