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Abstract
Outliers: The Story of Success is a book authored by Malcolm Gladwell and was first published on November 18, 2008. Gladwell started his career as a journalist in ‘The Washington Post’ and later joined ‘The New Yorker’. Known for his psychological experiments he has written two best seller books before this namely, ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink’. In his book ‘Outliers’, Gladwell tries to find the reason behind people’s success. The usual reasons Americans give for success is hard work, talent, innovations, bold decisions, good judgment etc. Gladwell on the other hand suggests that, while all these factors are important, it is equally imperative to get the right opportunities and make use of them optimally, to be successful in life. Malcolm Gladwell states in his book
“It is not the brightest who succeed, nor is success simply the sum of decisions and
Efforts we make on our behalf. It is those who are successful who are most likely
-Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008)
These above words of his aptly capture the essence of the book. He believes that, to succeed it is not just enough if you are bright, put in hard efforts and make the correct decisions, but it is more vital that you get the right opportunity to express your talent. Here, it is important to note that he does not write off the importance of talent and intelligence for success, but he places equal stress on the availability of right tools to hone the skills of the individual. In fact he says an individual has to spend at least 10,000 hours in practicing the task required for his chosen field.
He explains his concept with the example of many success stories of individuals and teams such as Bill Gates, The Beatles and the Canada Ice hockey players. He observes that, Bill Gates got access to computers from an early age of 13 even ion the 1970s and how he is one of the few among his age group, who went to a school which had a computer club. He also notes Bill gates spent close to 10,000 hours from the age 13 to 17, practicing his programming skills. He also makes an important note that almost 40% of ice hockey players in Canada are born in the first three months of the year and only 10% of them are born on November or December. He says that, guys born in January, February and March, mostly tend to be bigger in age compared to other students in their class. Being stronger than other students, enable them to get easy passage to star teams and thus they get a superior training.
Through other such examples Gladwell clearly establishes that most of the so called ‘self made’ individuals, have at one time or the other, had a lucky break or have been handed a benefit or opportunity by their parents, mentors or teachers, which was not available to others of similar talent. Who knows if there was another Bill Gates in Seattle, who would have gone on to build another silicon empire, if his parents had chosen a school for him which had a computer club to enable him master his skills? Thus through this book Gladwell, asks the society to take measures for enabling equal opportunity to all people to showcase their talent and believes that this would result in more people with talent and hard work succeeding in their life.
Reference
David Leonhardt. The New York Times. (November 28, 2008). Chance and Circumstance. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html?_r=0
