Review

Rating: 9

Outliers are those people that rise to the top — the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Henry Fords, JP Morgans, Carnegies, etc. The people that make names for themselves through their accomplishments.

Until reading this, I have had the notion that opportunity was created through hard work, and success was largely the result of applying oneself, with perhaps a little bit of luck mixed in. The implication of my mistaken view, of course, is that people that are not successful are lazy — which isn’t very fair, since many of the people that do not share the success of Bill Gates are very hard workers.

Gladwell, who was the guest speaker at our Scholarship Luncheon last year (my book is a gift from the Alumni Association, thanks guys!), sums up his ideas rather succinctly in the penultimate chapter:

“It is not the brightest who succeed. … 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.”

Each chapter of the book explores one (mistaken) explanation for why these people achieve hyper-success. “They’re geniuses,” or “They’re innately talented,” or “They were born into it.” Each of these people did work very hard, and they were intelligent, and they did have luck — but it’s much more than that.

Gladwell tears down our preconceptions about success being completely stochastic or completely deterministic — and builds up this idea of an outlier that gets a lucky break and runs it into next Tuesday. Not since Leavitt’s Freakonomics have I been shown such a revolutionary way of looking at commonplace observations.