Book Review – "The Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell

I first “experienced” Malcolm Gladwell when he was being interviewed on The Colbert Report after he wrote “Blink” He had a quirky look to him, including a bit of an afro haircut and had a funny sounding voice. He looked like Art Garfunkel, circa early 1970’s. But most of all, he was intelligent and well spoken. As he talked about “Blink” I could not help but want to read it. I was reading “Freakonomics” at the time and Gladwell got a big mention there so I picked up “Blink” and quickly finished it. This led to “The Tipping Point” which also was a wonderful read and this lead recently to “The Outliers”

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(This is Gladwell, not Art Garfunkel)

As CollegeBoy says, his go to source for quick information is Wikipedia and like son, like father, so here is what Wiki has to say about Gladwell’s books: “Gladwell's first work, The Tipping Point, discusses the potentially massive implications of small-scale social events, while his second book, Blink, explains how the human subconscious interprets events or cues and how past experiences allow people to make informed decisions very rapidly. Outliers examines how a person's environment, in conjunction with personal drive and motivation, affects his or her possibility and opportunity for success. Gladwell stated, "The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances."

I listened to the audio version, done by Gladwell himself, and was enthralled from the very beginning. His stories about Bill Gates and Airline pilots and J. Robert Oppenheimer of Manhattan project fame, as well as his thesis that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in a field was all fascinating. From Gates to the Beatles, he documents the things in the lives of so called “experts” to show where the 10,000 hours came from. He also contrasts it with individuals who had the same levels of intelligence but against whom life dealt problems, unable to be overcome, leaving them in a wake of failure and disappointment.

Gladwell is quirky and there is criticism in the academic community about his processes and style, but he seems to know how to grab the reader and take you for a little trip. I would definitely recommend any of these three books and look forward to reading his fourth, “What the Dog Saw” sometime soon.