Book Review: Outliers - The Story of SuccessAuthor: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Penguin Books
Price: Rs 399
Pages: 309
By Eisha Sarkar
Posted on Mumbai Mirror website on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 07:26:09 PM
It's the frustration at the way we generally look at really successful people that made Malcolm Gladwell come up with Outliers - The Story of Success. In his latest book, Gladwell goes out of his way to prove why people such as Bill Gates and the Beatles are not worth so much simply because they're 'really very smart' or 'very ambitious'. Instead, he says, its where these achievers come from that is key to their success. If the Chinese are good at mathematics, it's not because of the genes but it's because they grow rice in their country.
Throughout the book, Gladwell emphasises one point - that an individual's success is not based purely on merit or talent. There are a whole lot of ambient things that come into play which provide the right opportunities to the individual to showcase his skills and make the most of them.
He uses the example of the selection of players for the Canadian hockey team, the best in the world. A hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. Is it just a coincidence or does the selection process favours such players? Gladwell finds out.
Gladwell plays down the role of intelligence in making people successful. He justifies why many people with IQ greater than Einstein's aren't even academicians. He notes that most successful corporate lawyers in New York are Jewish men, who were born in Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s to immigrant parents who were in the garment industry. It can't be just coincidence, can it?
The most surprising pattern Gladwell unveils is the link between plane crashes and culture. "How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from — that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it's something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years," he writes on his website. Few people would think that giving pilots an alternate identity and improving cockpit communication might be the key to avoiding disasters.
While he delves on what makes th rich and the successful what they are, he also tells stories of faceless people who've become successful in their own way. The story of Marita, an inner city child in New York, who benefits from her school's novel educational approach, is one such.
The book tries to explain what success manuals, biographies of famous people and self-help guides don't. It thrusts on the fact that the most important element of success opportunity, chance or luck. Even Bill Gates can't deny that if more people were provided similar opportunities like he had when he was in school, there would have more rich and famous people in the world.
Like his previous two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, in this one too, Gladwell moves from one example to another, using statistical data to uncover patterns and links to seemingly unrelated phenomena. He may have eliminated examples that may have been contrary to his views, but that doesn't undermine the reasoning he has presented to put them forth. The book inspires you to redefine success. Like the examples in the book, the book itself is an outlier.
Publisher: Penguin Books
Price: Rs 399
Pages: 309
By Eisha Sarkar
Posted on Mumbai Mirror website on Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 07:26:09 PM
It's the frustration at the way we generally look at really successful people that made Malcolm Gladwell come up with Outliers - The Story of Success. In his latest book, Gladwell goes out of his way to prove why people such as Bill Gates and the Beatles are not worth so much simply because they're 'really very smart' or 'very ambitious'. Instead, he says, its where these achievers come from that is key to their success. If the Chinese are good at mathematics, it's not because of the genes but it's because they grow rice in their country.
Throughout the book, Gladwell emphasises one point - that an individual's success is not based purely on merit or talent. There are a whole lot of ambient things that come into play which provide the right opportunities to the individual to showcase his skills and make the most of them.
He uses the example of the selection of players for the Canadian hockey team, the best in the world. A hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. Is it just a coincidence or does the selection process favours such players? Gladwell finds out.
Gladwell plays down the role of intelligence in making people successful. He justifies why many people with IQ greater than Einstein's aren't even academicians. He notes that most successful corporate lawyers in New York are Jewish men, who were born in Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s to immigrant parents who were in the garment industry. It can't be just coincidence, can it?The most surprising pattern Gladwell unveils is the link between plane crashes and culture. "How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from — that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it's something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years," he writes on his website. Few people would think that giving pilots an alternate identity and improving cockpit communication might be the key to avoiding disasters.
While he delves on what makes th rich and the successful what they are, he also tells stories of faceless people who've become successful in their own way. The story of Marita, an inner city child in New York, who benefits from her school's novel educational approach, is one such.
The book tries to explain what success manuals, biographies of famous people and self-help guides don't. It thrusts on the fact that the most important element of success opportunity, chance or luck. Even Bill Gates can't deny that if more people were provided similar opportunities like he had when he was in school, there would have more rich and famous people in the world.
Like his previous two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, in this one too, Gladwell moves from one example to another, using statistical data to uncover patterns and links to seemingly unrelated phenomena. He may have eliminated examples that may have been contrary to his views, but that doesn't undermine the reasoning he has presented to put them forth. The book inspires you to redefine success. Like the examples in the book, the book itself is an outlier.
2 comments:
Nice review. Let me add something to the writer’s take on success and successful people. How does one know when one is successful? I mean we do say Bill Gates is successful. But when did he know that? Which milestone in life would have made him realise he is “successful” from that moment onwards? Was there any such milestone in the first place? I doubt. If there was no such milestone, when and how did he know he was successful? Was it when all of us started talking about his billions or was it when we started using the software developed by his company? Was it when we started becoming envious of what he has and started feeling bad that we did not have all that? It’s something that needs to be answered. Only then can we know what success is and what it means. If your mom stayed a house-wife all her life and brought you up and made a human out of a donkey, is she not successful? She is. Then why don’t be celebrate her success? Why doesn’t anyone call her successful? At the end of it, success is glamorous. What do we want in our lives to consider ourselves successful. We may all be successful in our own rights. But unfortunately, it gets noticed only when we make millions of people jealous of what we have and they don’t. It’s simple. Success is something that you have and others know about it. At least in most cases. What do you say, Eisha?
That's true Vish. The term success is relative. We judge by the means we have. If a kid scores more marks in an exam than his peers, he's deemed to be successful. While the term success is supposed to define people who are exceptional, what it does in the end is that it groups them together, as if to say, "Look at these people. Here's the recipe to make your life better."
Post a Comment