#1 Outliers

I started reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is also the author of Blink and The Tipping Point (a book I had been meaning to read... but forgot about it). He is also, if you remember, the person who was speaking in the very loud video in the class next door a few days ago!

This book was highly recommended to me (rather it was forced into my hands before I could respond) by my best friend. She claims it is one of the most influential books she has ever read, so naturally, I was intrigued. She said he is a fantastic writer, and he blew her mind.

I have to say, so far I agree.

Outliers is a book about success. But it's not a How To Be Successful, or Success For Dummies, or Get Successful Quick kind of book. Rather, it is a compilation of research and entertaining analysis of successful figures, and why they became successful. These "outliers" are people who are classed differently from the main population of people, and are statistically differentiated. They are involved in special cases and situations that have allowed them to accomplish extraordinary things because they lie outside of a typical population sample.

From the very beginning, Gladwell destroyed all of my preconceived notions of how one becomes successful. He claimed, and has continued to prove across various cases, that success is less about natural talent or hard work, and much more about being around in just the right circumstance at just the right time.

Malcolm Gladwell

I will try to summarize one of his first examples he uses to illustrate this idea. He explains how success in hockey is not based on individual merit, but rather a series of circumstantial chain reactions. He presents the reader with a roster of the Medicine Hat Tigers team (The Tigers are one of the top teams in the Canadian Hockey League), and it is fairly easy to notice that all of the players are fairly close in age, between 16 and 20. But, more interesting than relative age, are the months these top hockey players were born in. Of the 25 players, only 8 of them were born outside of January, February, or March. This pattern is consistent across multiple Canadian hockey leagues and, believe it or not, there is a reason for this. This is because “the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1”(24) Gladwell goes on to explain that, “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”(24). From this point on, the players with early birthdays will always be one step ahead. They are bigger, stronger, and faster. This allows them to join better teams, get that extra training, and get recruited for more competitive traveling leagues. These advantages add up, and what was once just a physical difference between players, quickly becomes a large difference in skill level, all because of where they were in relation to the eligibility cutoff.

That was a great way for Gladwell to start off his book. I was shocked and hooked, and eager to learn more right away. Everything he writes about I find genuinely interesting. It amazes me that people are able to notice these strange trends, then study them and find that there is some reasoning behind it all.

As with the hockey players, Gladwell goes on to examine successful figures such as Bill Joy (revolutionized computer programming), The Beatles (biggest name in the British Invasion), and Bill Gates (heard of that company, Microsoft?), to name just a few, and explains how each of them came to be so successful. I wish I could just copy down all of these sections so you could read them here because it is so cool to read how it really wasn’t all about talent or intellect. Their successes were largely due to having been raised in an environment perfectly cultivated at just the right time for them to burst into the music scene, or a science field.

Gladwell is insightful, and this book is challenging me to view success in a new way entirely.

From Part 1, Opportunity, I especially liked when he wrote, “Their world-their culture and generation and family history-gave them the greatest opportunities”(Gladwell 158).

I just started the second of three parts, entitled Legacy. So far this section has only discussed the legacy of family feuds in the Appalachians, but I am interested to learn what Gladwell has to say about bloodlines and family histories of success.

I would recommend this book to anyone really. It is intriguing to learn the truth about success, and to uncover this huge mystery. Gladwell writes in an accessible manner- he doesn't use lofty psychoanalytical terms- he is just straightforward. The examples and the cases he studies are the best. After I learn about one person I am always excited to see who he will talk about next! I don’t think I've been this excited about a book in a long time. So yes, I would say I am happy with my friend’s recommendation.