Outliers

Outliers: A Story of Success is a novel written by Malcolm Gladwell. It discusses how extremely successful people came to be. Gladwell uses numerous studies and examples from history to prove his points and draw conclusions. The book is divided into two sections: Opportunity and Legacy. In Opportunity, Gladwell describes the stories of Canadian hockey players, geniuses, a man named Christopher Langan, and New York lawyers in 1950s. In the second part of the book, Legacy, Gladwell illustrates how our heritage and culture we inherit affects how our personalities. Gladwell uses examples of family feuds in the Appalachians, airplane crashes, Asians’ ability to excel in mathematics, and KIPP Academy. Gladwell writes in an informative tone, but manages to avoid becoming dry facts. He uses vivid descriptions of the background of each of the stories he tells to give the studies and history life. Gladwell breaks down the romanticized view we hold of incredibly successful people, and thoroughly explains what factors in their lives and background attributed to their success. Gladwell explains that success is not just a matter of hard work and talent. He uses the example of Christopher Langan, an incredibly brilliant man with an IQ of 195, who ended up a college drop-out because he could not get opportunities to help him finish a higher education. Langan was talented and hard-working but he was not able to succeed. In Opportunity, Gladwell concludes that success is a matter of being born into the right circumstances, with a drive to succeed and work hard. The second part of the book was what I found the most interesting. In this portion of the novel, Gladwell describes and explains how the cultural legacy we inherit from where we’re from and our family distinctly affects our personalities and how we act. One example he uses is the phenomenon of Asian countries success in mathematics. To explain this, Gladwell goes back to the history of southern China and their dependence on rice paddies. The process of rice farming is incredibly labor intensive and needs constant care and attention. Since China had such a need for rice it created a culture that put an extreme value on hard work. Meanwhile in European countries, the crops grown needed to be rested every few years and is much less labor intensive than rice paddies. This difference in agriculture created the idea in European culture of the necessity of rest. Gladwell proves that this phenomenon is still relevant today by talking about standardized testing scores. The TIMSS is a standardized test that has a 125 questionnaire and is very difficult to finish. The students that were able to finish the questionnaire were the same students that did well on the math section. These students were mostly from Asian countries. Gladwell correlates this success to the cultural legacy from the rice paddies. Outliers: The Story of Success is an incredibly interesting read that helps create a new perspective on the idea of success and what leads to it.