Outliers, the story of success by Malcolm Gladwell

Reviewed by Ghassan Fadhal

One of the most amazing and wonderful books discussing the concept of great success and achieving success beyond normal and how should we look at success. Malcolm Gladwell in this 3rd book he authored after his first 2 best sellers "The Tipping Point" and "Blink" comes with a 3rd best seller that is considered a revolution in the way success should be looked upon.

Outliers deals with exceptional people, especially those who are smart, rich, and successful, and those who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible, said Bill Wadman at TIME, which is also the best definition of who is an outlier.

Intro:

Malcolm starts his book with an introduction that captures your mind and gets you hooked to it in the way he states facts that make you start asking questions in your mind that you never thought about. He then shows you that the answers can be in front of you and all you had to do is to change the way your looking at the matter and in this case its a matter of you looking at where successful people come from rather than what they are for us to understand what makes successful people really successful. He also argues that sometimes we have to change our way of defining things for us to understand them better.

For a start that subtley smooth intro can make you think that its talking about something totally different but yet interesting but as soon as you get into the actually parts of the book thats when you things start getting interesting.

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Part 1: Opportunity: the fisrt major part of success to Gladwell is Opportunity. Basically its being giving a chance or an advantage over some1else. Its how this opportunity presents its self in a clear manner, like a scholarship or supporting parents, or in a vague hidden form that is not clear to public or the person him self such as the little advantage of being born at a certain time of the year that will give you an age advantage to become a star team hockey player in canada.

Chapter 1: The Mathew Effect This chapter discusses how that the society norms and the systems that we implement in scools or sports or whatever it maybe especially that include closing dates can give an advantage for certain people with certain birth dates over others and its nothing to do with talent and lucky star signs. The Advantage of Timing and the opportunity you are given.

Chapter 2: 10,000 hour rule It's a rule proven through psychological research that if you spend 10,000 hrs practicing a specific skill you shall become an outlier or exceptionally good at it. Malcolm also shows through history how the 10,000 hr rule is the common factor of success of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Bill Joy (father of Internet), and the Beatles (the greatest music band in history).

Chapter 3: The Trouble with Geniuses part 1 Malcolm shows through the story of the smartest man in america today Chris Langan how being smart and with a very high IQ doesnt grantee your success and you becoming an outlier and how a research made in america about young students with high IQs and their progress through life that IQ alone didnt get most of them very far in life.

Chapter 4: The Trouble with Geniuses part 2 Here a strong comparisant was made between Langan and Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, and how the latter was able to be more successful due to his social skills even thou he tried to poison one of his teachers at university days and managed to get away with it. Also a strong lesson of the culture of success and what family you are brought up in is taught.

Chapter 5: The Three lessons of Joe Flom Joe Flom coming from a poor immigrant jewish family becomes one of the biggest lawyers and law firm partners in New York due to three contributing factors that had to do with cultural background, Opportunity, and practicing a skill more than any1 else.

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Part 2: Legacy

Chapter 6: Harlan, Kentucky Harlan is a mountain town in Kentucky that was famous for 2 families war that led to a lot of blood shed. Malcolm examines the story and how your cultural legacy contribute to making you who you are in life and in programing your behaviours.

Chapter 7: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes My fav Chapter in the book, Malcolm shows how cultural legacy can contribute in plane crashes and how air Korea managed to tune their organisation culture to overcome their alarming high plane crash rate into a new era of accident free safe flying.

Chapter 8: Rice Paddis and Mathes Tests Most People believe that to be good in maths you have to be smart or you need certain genes. Malcolm argues and proves that being good at maths has more to do with how hard wroking you are, and that your cultural legacy of hard work like the chinese rice growing culture can make you very good at maths just like the chinese are. Baiscally, if u studied with chinese students you will notice how good they are at maths and he links that with the chinese proverb, "No one that wakes up before dawn for 360 days a year fails to make their family rich".

Chapter 9: Marita's Bargain Marita is a student at a Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) School. She works extra hard than many adults would do and spends more time in school than many of her peers in other schools. What she is getting in return is extra high preformance and buiding a successful personality. Malcolm explains the secret of the success of the KIPP school system and how they managed to transform kids from the ghetos of the bronx into high achievers that many colleges like harvard would give scholarships to.

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Epilogue: A Jamaican Story

Here, a very sweet conculsion and a touching story and examination of history that links jamaican history of slavery, class division and how malcolm gladwell parents met and had a baby in the world. Malcolm shows how a decision or sacafice made by his grandmother led to his success today. very touching and very deep in meaning.

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I shall end with a part at end chapter 9 that sums up lessons learnt from this amazing book and it goes as follows: "How could that be a bad bargain? Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it's a better shot at making the all-star team. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks. They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.

The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a timesharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunities for all. If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars. Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession. The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for."

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