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Outliers: The Story of Success | 
 enlarge | Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Allen Lane
Category: Book
List Price: £16.99
Buy New: £9.29
You Save: £7.70 (45%)
New (18) Used (3) from £8.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 39
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3
ISBN: 1846141214
EAN: 9781846141218
ASIN: 1846141214
Publication Date: November 18, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 There is a tide in the affairs of men January 6, 2009
"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."
Brutus (from Julius Caesar)captures the essence of this book. It's an entertaining read with good stories and examples. Its basic message is easy to summarise.
Success is not a linear journey. And there are always particular local factors that enable it. No one is really self made. Success is about preparation and opportunity coming together. All successful people have had some "lucky breaks" although I think it was a great golfer who said, "The more I practice the luckier I seem to become."
The administrative and technical quirks (such as where you are in your school year) that have such a huge effects on your academic and sporting achievements, and future prospects are well described. The small starting differences that lead to massive differential reinforcement effects are well described.
And the combination of a skill and a brand new field opening up is unbeatable for major success as Bill Gates and Bill Joy demonstrate.
This book is not the last word on success but it gives many useful pointers, and may help you realise where some of your opportunities are, and also where they won't be found no matter how good you are at something.
It's a great quick read and you will learn some useful ideas from it.
How to "unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't" January 6, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
In reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, I express an opinion that Gladwell offers an insight that others have previously expressed and then requires 300+ pages to discuss it. His key points in both books could have been made in an article. Gladwell's "tipping point"(2002), for example, is essentially the same as Michael Kami's "trigger point" (1988) and Andrew Gove "inflection point" (1996). (Gladwell does acknowledge the importance of an article, "Broken Windows," co-authored by James Wilson and George Kelling for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982). When I began to read Outliers, therefore, I feared that Gladwell would once again offer a thoughtful but verbose examination of a by-now familiar insight: success requires more than extraordinary talent.
That said, Outliers is (in my opinion) his most significant and most valuable book thus far. As the Epilogue clearly indicates, this is also his most personal book. In it, Gladwell demonstrates superior storyteller skills as he discusses several quite different situations that demonstrate that "the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are...[Those who succeed] owe something to parentage and patronage. [They] may look like they did all by themselves. But in fact 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 others cannot...It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are [begin italics] from [end italics] that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
Gladwell provides many different versions of "the story of success" involving those who demonstrate what sociologists call "accumulative advantage." For example, in any youth sports competition (especially hockey) that groups players according to the calendar year of birth, those who are born in January, February, or March are more likely to be bigger, better coordinated, and more talented because of "the phenomenon of relative age." They will play more often, receive more individual attention, and be selected to play on better teams because they were born closest to the cut-off date. Their success follows a predictable course. "Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them." Clearly, Gladwell agrees with Geoff Colvin that "talent is overrated." As does Colvin, he cites The 10,000-Hour Rule and suggests that "once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, [begin italics] much [end italics] harder."
John Maxwell makes the same point in Talent Is Never Enough. If it were, "then the most effective and influential people would always be the most talented ones but that is often not the case...Clearly talent isn't everything." That said, he hastens to add, talent is worthy of our admiration and must be perceived in the proper perspective. Maxwell's key point is that all of us have a choice, actually several choices, and can determine to what extent (if any) we take full advantage of the talents we have, such as they are. "If you do, you will add value to yourself, add value to others, and accomplish much more than you dreamed was possible." Gladwell agrees but would presumably stress, also, the importance of others (family members, teachers, coaches, clergy, patrons, and mentors) to being able to commit 10,000 hours, "the magic number of greatness," to (Colvin's term) "deliberate practice." The success of the various outliers whom Gladwell discusses is not exceptional or mysterious. "It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."
Is personal success really personal? December 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I always argued with friends that we never quite know how a successful individual or a company as made it big.
Of course we all know about the endless working hours, the "talented" individual and the help of a focused team.
But if this was the rule we will have had far more successful people and companies.
Gladwell analyse in a very entertaining and insightful way, how the individual itself is just a minor part of a far bigger mechanism that takes place to make his life a success. Social environment, culture, ethnicity, family background, timing and even generation size play an amazing part on the reason why people outperform their peers.
Thousands of self-help books and videos that focus on just your ability to "make it big" (and the slightly guilt feeling of not doing enough) can finally be put aside and considered what they are, self-help books for the writer's fortune...
 slightly underwhealming December 29, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I wanted to love this, really I did, but it's one very simple idea (albeit a fairly good one) spun out to fill an entire book. Not up to the standard of "The Tipping Point".
Entertaining Read December 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I'm a fan of Malcolm Gladwell having read his previous Blink and The Tipping Point. All his books are about interesting topics and are told in a way that keeps the reader engaged. Similarly to the other books the criticism can always be made that he makes about 4-5 valid points and stretches them out to a full book but when the writing is engaging and takes you on a journey it doesn't really matter.
The book itself takes you through what drives success. Arguing that it's a combination of intelligence (both IQ and emotional intelligence), luck (opportunties and timing), cultural context and hard work (the much-reported 10,000 hours). All this could be argued to be fairly obvious but through the examples and anecdotes Gladwell dispelled many myths at the same time as entertaining.
All-in-all a good read.
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