Art done by Allison J. Warner
Outliers: The Story of Success - Review
Link to the author's (M. Gladwell) personal website
Genre: Non-Fiction
Publication Type: Book
Tags:
- Average Age of Main Characters (30)
- Length (4 / 10)
Link to Goodreads
Blurb: In this stunning new 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. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
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. 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.
Review: This one's another one that's a bit out of left field compared to my usual, but it wasn't too bad at all. So I enjoyed the premise that to be truly great at something, you need a double dose of dedication and then some sprinkles of luck. Each chapter introduces a new example of this principle (not one-to-one) from a wildly different angle and field. I found the opening examples of programming experts and professional athletes as pretty interesting, and it should be noted that the writing in this book is super solid.
There is a bit of danger though, especially in some sections where statistics are referenced, and readers should be aware of this. The examples used aren't analysed in depth, and as they often reference 'outliers' and need to be placed in text, they are in general quite small and potentially misleading. This isn't a criticism so much as just a tiny heads up, as if you're looking for heavy proofs then you should be reading journal articles and the like. I found the second half of the book less interesting than the first half, and I think this just came from me not enjoying the examples each chapter was based on as much. I was also a bit less convinced by the hypotheses in the second half, but this might have be because of the former lesser interest in the examples. This book's quite good for this however, and I think that you could stop half-way through and still take away something interesting without feeling the need to finish like with fantasy books.