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• ISBN13: 9780316017923
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| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Malcolm Gladwell | | Hardcover:
| 309 pages | | Publisher:
| Little, Brown and Company | | Publication Date:
| November 18, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 0316017922 | | Package Length:
| 8.1 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.4 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.1 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.75 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 999 reviews |
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 Got me an easy A in English Lit but otherwise, don't bother.Sep 03, 2010
This was a required book for my college English Lit class. It was an easy read and doing a report on it was also easy. However, after the opening hook, it relies on anecdotes and junk science. Read it for fun, and its few thought provoking moments. But if you are a parent, don't use this as a gauge for Little Johnny or Jane's future because they weren't born in the right time or at the right place. It's good for an A in an English class, but that's about all.
 Interesting Read About Factors Contributing To SuccessSep 01, 2010
"Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell is an extremely well-written, insightful, and fascinating evaluation of what external factors in a person's life lead to success or failure. The book also examines the effects culture has on people and how those effects influence peoples' lives.
Gladwell writes: "The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with."
Gladwell writes about the microcomputer revolution and tells us most successful entrepreneurs during that revolution were born in the mid-1950s. This made them just old enough to take advantage of the microcomputer revolution that began in the mid-1970s.
Gladwell concludes: "I don't mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren't .... But there are very clearly patterns here, and what's striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. ... Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up."
Not only is the year of birth important, but, surprisingly, the month of birth is sometimes crucial too. In his outstanding chapter, "The Matthew Effect," Gladwell examines the months of birth of star athletes and shows that when junior sports have eligibility cut-off dates, the effects of those cut-off date propagates all the way up to the professional level of play.
For example, in Canada, most professional hockey players are born in January. The next most popular birth months are February and March. Forty percent of professional Canadian hockey players are born in these months. Thirty percent are born in the next three months of April to June, and only 20 percent are born between October and December. Why is this?
Gladwell explains: "It's simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year--and, at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity."
The implications of this sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy" are important to parents. Gladwell says parents often contemplate holding children who are born at the end of the calendar year back from kindergarten until they are a bit more mature. Gladwell says many parents probably decide to enroll the kids anyway because they assume any disadvantage the child suffers will go away with time. "But it doesn't. It's just like hockey. The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years[,]" concludes Gladwell.
Gladwell writes about the academic and career advantages children born to richer parents have over children born to less affluent parents. Richer parents and financially poor parents have markedly different parenting styles. Richer parents tend to cultivate their kids, shuttle them between different activities, encourage them to interact with the adult world, and advocate strongly for them. Gladwell says poorer parents often believe children will just grow up and develop on their own. They also view the child's world as relatively inconsequential and separate from their adult world. Impoverished parents are often intimidated by authority, so they don't seek special privileges for their children. Children from more affluent homes learn social skills that help them succeed in life. On the downside, children from more affluent homes are often more self-centered and, literally, spoiled.
What about the role of public or private education in determining how well children do? Gladwell addresses this in detail in a well-woven chapter titled "Marita's Bargain." He tells us the story of a young girl named Marita who attends an intensive school in the Bronx called KIPP Academy. The students put in massive amounts of time, and they do exceptionally well, especially in math. It reminded me of the film "Sand and Deliver." Come to school early, stay late, come in on Saturday, and work through the summer. Yep, that'll do it.
While many politicians talk about the need to improve schools in impoverished areas, Gladwell tells us the achievement gap between poorer and richer students actually occurs during summer vacation, when poorer students lose ground academically. Gladwell concludes: "Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of the differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school. ... For its poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem..." It becomes clear the majority of American students would benefit from much shorter summer vacations.
To be good in math requires effort. And, the cultures of many countries encourages students to work hard and instills the belief that if they work hard, they will learn. All students are expected to succeed. In America, by contrast, there is more of a false belief that talent in math is innate. Gladwell shows us that cultural differences can affect learning. Drawing upon the book "The Number Sense" by Stanislas Dehaene, we learn that Asians may have a built-in cultural advantage in learning math. In particular, the Chinese have shorter words for numbers, which allows them to remember more numbers.
For example, Gladwell tells us that only about half of Americans can remember the sequence of 4,8,5,3,9,7,6 after 20 seconds of study. Yet, nearly all Chinese can remember the sequence, because the Chinese language allows all those numbers to be said in a two-second period.
I highly recommend "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is very well written and packed with insight.
That multiple factors contribute to an individual's likelihood of achieving success is clearly common sense.Aug 29, 2010
Although the factors author Malcolm Gladwell puts forth as coming into play and the data he uses to support his claims about outliers, which he describes as, (p 17), "men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary," are generally interesting, most are unsurprising. He contends that, (p 18) "there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success," and (p 19) "People don't rise from nothing...they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways that others cannot." One wouldn't need much more than a little common sense to conclude that a person needs more than just a high IQ to achieve success (the other required component he calls, "practical intelligence"). The same is true for such things as the fact that athletes (and students) with birth dates placing them on the elder end of the spectrum of those making up a pool of potential standouts in academics and athletics do better than their youngest peers. Having a special talent (low supply) at the right time in history (high demand) is also likely to yield benefits. That children of parents who teach them special skills; kids who place the value of hard work over that of innate intelligence; and those who spend a significant time practicing their craft (independent of their initial aptitude for it) have a higher chance of success is also no surprise.
My biggest gripe about the data, of which most of us know can often be framed with a little effort to support opposing views, is that about education. Specifically, Gladwell contends that (p 259) "[between] September and June...Schools work," in support of his claim that (p 258), "when it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session." I agree that one of the reasons that other countries' students perform better than American kids academically is that their students' schools are in session longer, but I disagree wholeheartedly that kids from poor families do comparably well as those from middle and high income families during the school year. In my state, Washington, low-income students (those who qualify for free or reduced price lunch) overwhelmingly perform significantly worse on state tests (WASL/MSP) than those who don't by a wide margin in every tested subject and in every tested grade.
In summary, while Outliers provides food for thought (and plenty of facts and figures), Gladwell's primary contention, that several fortuitous circumstances combined trump one single significant factor when it comes to predicting a person's success, is simply sensible. Better: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey, Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, and On the Ridge Between Life and Death by David Roberts.
Malcom Gladwell does it againAug 28, 2010
Outliers is a fantastic read. If Gladwell started out this book with the intention of changing one's perspective on how success is achieved, he has without a doubt succeeded.
He breaks down success with the 10,000 hour rule and the legacy of culture, all of which make perfect sense. If you have not realized yet, Gladwell has the uncanny ability to point out things that we overlook. He does it flawlessly here with stories of successful software billionaires, lawyers and doctors.
An interesting bit in this book is as personal as it gets, Gladwell's breakdown of his mother as an outlier. A set of perfectly timed events centuries ago that result in her ending up in Canada.
The word Interesting does not do justice to this book. I highly recommend it.
Intriguing bookAug 27, 2010
I was very intrigued by the first half of the book. Great ideas regarding the influence birthday cutoffs have on our future development path. However, the second half seemed to wander and I didn't feel there was a connection to the concepts presented in the first half.
I would recommend this book, but it didn't quite live up to the hype for me.
Rami
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