Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Outliers: The Story of Success. Dec 06, Rebecca rated it it was amazing Shelves: philosophy , political. Gladwell argues that success is tightly married to opportunity and time on task. He states that it takes approximately 10, hours to master something and that gives me comfort.
It helps me feel better about my many failures at initial attempts to master things like glazing pottery, algebra, Salsa dancing, skiing and sewing I kept thinking, "I've just got to put in more hours if I want to do better.
In a rare moment, I found myself not wanting to argue. This reflection was very humbling. Moreover, I felt the text tugging at the need for greater equity. What could all the people with limited opportunities do if given greater opportunities? Think Darfur. How many people who might have come up with the cure for pancreatic cancer been forced to spend their time standing in lines waiting for clean water or food?
My own personal experience as a teacher of refugees reflects Gladwell's primary thesis. Many of my refugee students are pre-literate. They have not been given the opportunity to gain a formal education.
As a result, there are many well-intended, but misinformed people who place these students in special education courses or deem their I. The students I teach are hungry for skills and spend hours outside of class practicing. They make huge gains despite earlier opportunities denied them.
While many will not go on to big colleges out of high school, I feel like given enough opportunity and time they could make it there. Sadly, many have families who depend on them to work to help financially support the family.
Yet, another limited opportunity to spend time focused on developing skills. In the past week, I have shared Gladwell's thesis with my students. We have applied the 10, hours to master a task to reading and writing. I remind students that if we don't get our 10, hours this year together, they must continue on their own. I remind them that it IS possible to move forward if they are focused and keep adding hours of work to their reading and writing.
We even write on the board how many hours left before we are masters. They just get more chances to read? That's correct. You are just as smart as any white kid in this school. It's just that some of them have been reading for years and you are just getting started. View all 50 comments.
Jun 24, Bill Kerwin rated it it was ok. When I think about Malcolm Gladwell, the first phrase that comes to mind is "less than meets the eye.
Beginning with a few maverick, counter-intuitive insights, he often ends with an affirmation of consensus, but it is a consensus that has been broadened by investigation and enriched by nuance. On second look, however, I'm no longer sure any of this is true. What first appeared to be new insights are nothing but fami When I think about Malcolm Gladwell, the first phrase that comes to mind is "less than meets the eye.
What first appeared to be new insights are nothing but familiar landmarks, previously unrecognizable because of the adoption of a deliberately mannered perspective; even the once apparent breadth and nuance now seem triumphs of language over logic, the apparent inevitability of his arguments an illusion conjured by the spell of his limpid prose. Take one small example from "Outliers. I'll concede the point, for the sake of argument, but any high school teacher will tell you how suspect conclusions drawn from such statistics can be.
He then presents a sustained anecdote about a successful all-year-round secondary school in a poor neighborhood. His conclusion? We should go to school year round. Sounds reasonable, right? But what about a more obvious solution: as a society we could decide to work together so that summer can be a learning experience for the poor by instituting a myriad of basketball camps, music camps, art camps, chess camps, traditional summer camps, etc.
Gladwell often reminds me of the last panel of a Dilbert cartoon: two panels of plain-speaking criticism, followed by one panel of resignation.
And no real insight, no real hope for the future. View all 63 comments. Jan 03, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it it was amazing Shelves: behavioural-economics , psychology , social-theory. There are a number of ways I can tell a book will be good; one of those ways is if Graham has recommended it to me how am I going to cope without our lunches together, mate? Well, not since Predictably Irrational also recommended to me by Graham have I gone on and on about a book to people.
Now it is your turn. It is a comforting thought, in some ways. And in this cult of celebrity we even get a chance to live vicariously in the reflection of their glory. Perhaps we can never all be Lady Di, at least, not in public but we can all attempt suicide with a pate knife and get into colonic irrigation. John then talks about how much hard work he had to put in to becoming successful, none of which relied on the mythical leg up he would have gotten from some secret Jewish conspiracy.
The biographies are generally told twice. The first time in a way that confirms all our prejudices about self made men and then in a way that makes sense of the success in ways we may find much more uncomfortable. I really struggled with this book — I loved every minute of it, but I still felt remarkably challenged by it. It was very hard not to think of my own life while reading this book. And this did not make me feel comfortable.
I guess we are all fairly predictable, and one of the things that makes us especially predictable is that we generally like to have our prejudices confirmed. We buy books that tell us over and over again what we already know and believe.
The Left Behind series is just one such example, as are most self help books. But there is a much better sensation we can get from a book, although this is much more rare. It is when the person you are reading starts telling you the deeper reasons why your beliefs are valid and not just based on prejudice. I have always believed talent is another although, less apparent and all too vague word for hard work. This book confirms those prejudices.
First he talks about ice hockey and a fascinating fact about the birthdays of the best players. They are all born at around the same time of the year. It is as if there is a cut off date for when you will be a professional ice hockey player — and, in fact, there is. The short version is that if you are born on the wrong side of the date they use to group kids into age levels you are likely to be a year younger than the other kids you are playing ice hockey with and therefore a year smaller than them too.
That is going to make them look like they are better players than you are — and they will be too. A year at 10 is a huge difference, a huge advantage. And then we compound that advantage, by giving the older kids more practice, more experience in games and then more experience and more practice until there is no way the kid who happened to be born on the wrong side of the cut off date has any chance of catching up.
Essentially he shows that if you put in 10, hours on any task you will be highly proficient at that task. Innate ability does not exist and ability is actually a function of effort expended. This is both liberating and incredibly challenging. Challenging, because ultimately we are responsible for our own success as we are directly responsible for how much effort we are prepared to put in. The second great theme of this book is that where you come from matters.
The culture that we are from has a remarkable impact on the rest of our lives. When people in authority speak to you, you are probably less likely to question them. In fact, you might believe you should defer to them. People from the middle class are much more likely to see rules as things that can be shaped or changed or ignored to make their life more easy or rewarding.
Having come from the working class, even a particularly radical end of it, I can still see aspects of this deference in my own character and this was perhaps the most challenging part of the book for me. The other challenging bit was the part about the Hatfields and McCoys. The solution might be a little too neat, but the Irish, particularly the Northern Irish, are far too likely to feuds that are intractable and recognising that that might have cultural roots beyond the excuse of religion is utterly fascinating to me.
The lessons of this book can be put into a brief sentence: success depends on a series of cultural and other factors that are mostly beyond your control — however, the thing that is totally within your control about success is how much effort you put in. And the more effort you put in the more likely you will be successful.
They are directly proportional and we should all praise work as the key thing that really makes us human. I loved this book. I noticed that Ginnie points to a pilot who disputes some of what Gladwell says about culture and plane crashes, but this is a minor point.
His bigger point about culture and plane crashes still stands and is remarkable. If you have kids, read this book — it will give you hints on how to bring them up with perhaps a modest sense of entitlement — it could make all of the difference. Ginnie also has a link to an article with a photo of the man himself — I was saying to the kids yesterday that I would give a couple of toes to look nearly as cool as he does, but I think it would take more than just toes.
Look, what can I say? Read this book, it is life altering. Well, maybe not life altering, but a delight nonetheless. View all comments. Dec 29, Allie rated it really liked it. Didn't exactly read this book - Joe and I listened to it in the car on the way home from visiting family for Christmas. I really enjoyed it, and was very fascinated by certain parts of it, especially the sections about the Beatles, computer programmers and Korean co-pilots.
But my enjoyment of the book was marred by the glaring absence of any well-known female "outliers. Man after man after high-achieving man was featured. Any time a woman was mentioned, it seemed she was a wife or mother helping to boost a high achiever to success - or, in one case toward the end of the book, a somewhat slow female math student that a male professor had videotaped trying to figure out a math problem.
By the time we got to that vignette, it was so ridiculous that Joe and I both started laughing, and Joe joked that "the only woman in the book is dumb - but persistent. Gladwell doesn't strike me as a raging sexist, so my guess is that he is so used to being a male in this world and constantly hearing about and identifying with male high achievers that maybe he didn't even realize what he was doing. I noticed that he gave a pretty weak response when questioned in an interview about his omission of women - he claimed that he had not omitted women because he mentioned his grandmother's story at the end of the book, in the epilogue, I think.
Um, okay. View all 35 comments. Dec 16, Steve rated it it was ok. Occasionally insightful, but Gladwell's science is pretty junky. His reasons for success change by the page. And he cherry-picks examples to exactly fit the scheme under consideration. Plus, he's obsessed with callbacks and summary statements that only showcase the faulty connections between ideas.
View all 11 comments. Nov 14, David rated it liked it Shelves: culture-society. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Malcolm Gladwell's new book reads like a series of cocktail-party anecdotes. Whether the book is a mere fluff piece or something more is open to debate. At its heart, it has two themes: 1 That success depends not just on talent but opportunity, and 2 that success and failure also depend on the cultural legacies we inherit from our forebears.
Luck matters. Hockey players who happened to be born between January and March were disproport Malcolm Gladwell's new book reads like a series of cocktail-party anecdotes. Hockey players who happened to be born between January and March were disproportionately represented in professional hockey leagues. From an early age, these players were the oldest in their age bracket, and therefore bigger and more coordinated. Coaches selected them for better training and playing opportunities, and overtime, success bred success.
Likewise, students who happened to be older for their class scored higher on math and science tests than their younger classmates, and were more likely to be picked for "gifted" and other advanced programs.
Even smart people need 10, hours of practice before they master a skill. Those that can get those 10, hours during childhood are a step ahead. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and The Beatles all had unique opportunities to have lots and lots of practice in their specialties at an early age before becoming successful.
After , increases in IQ are less important than creativity and "practical intelligence" -- knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. A lifelong study of geniuses showed they were no more successful than the average population.
These herdsmen warriors brought with them a willingness to fight in response to the smallest slight. This led to a pattern of bloody and violent feuds between families across the Appalachian states. Think Hatfields vs. Korean Airlines had an unusually high rate of plane crashes because of the Korean culture's extreme deference to superiors.
Junior pilots were reluctant to directly contradict their Captain on a flight, even in the face of grave error. This explains, for instance, the Korean Air Flight crash in Guam in When the airline hired a specialist from Delta to retrain the pilots to speak more transparently, their safety record went up dramatically. Asians are good at math and science because their ancestors planted rice paddies.
Rice farming was more labor intensive than Western agriculture. Asians have inherited this stick-with-it-ness that allows them to excel in math and science, where perseverance is mandatory. Unlike rice paddies, wheat or corn fields need to be left fallow every few years. Early American educators adopted this principle toward schooling - that students must not be exhausted. Hence, the long summer vacation, a distinctly American legacy.
But this legacy is counterproductive, because kids tend to forget things over the summer. Kids who go to schools with shorter summer breaks tend to have higher test scores. View all 10 comments. Dec 19, Eric rated it liked it. I can save you the trouble of reading the book: smart people don't automatically become successful, they do so because they got lucky. This rule applies to everyone including the likes of Bill Gates and Robert Oppenheimer.
That's it. That's what the whole book is about. Gladwell looks at case after case of this: Canadian hockey players, Korean airline pilots, poor kids in the Bronx, Jewish lawyers, etc Even with all this evidence it feels like he's pulling in examples that fit his theory and I can save you the trouble of reading the book: smart people don't automatically become successful, they do so because they got lucky. Even with all this evidence it feels like he's pulling in examples that fit his theory and ignoring others.
Thus while we look at many examples of geniuses who got lucky we do not look at Einstein which seems strange as he's the best known genius of the 20th century. While the book can be summarized in one sentence, the individual chapters are interesting such as the chapter that discusses a plane crash that happened in New York because the pilots were too subservient to make it clear to the air traffic controllers that they were almost out of gas.
In short, the parts of this book were more interesting then the whole. View all 22 comments. It's a book about forests. I originally thought this to be a self-improvement kind of book, but quickly figured that's not the case, then may be some sort of a business development one, which also fell apart quickly.
I cannot round off this any closer than to some kind of a sociology - psycholo "This is not a book about tall trees. I cannot round off this any closer than to some kind of a sociology - psychology combo. I liked that book a lot, and out of nowhere, Thiel attacks Gladwell in his book for being a negative influence on readers.
But after reading the entire book now, I'm don't believe Thiel's criticisms are fully justified. Being said that, some of the concepts in outliers like 10, hour rule, though explained in a very clear and attractive manner, still seems a little bit out there.
It's true that we are naturally reluctant to accept that certain unchangeable parameters in life to have any significant meaning towards our successes and failures in life, such as the birth month. It's kind of confusing how that kind of information suppose to help a person, unless of course the reader is purely interested in understanding such limitations and just accept them.
This could indeed create a negative spiral of events, if someone embraces these limitations and give up on everything. If this is the first non-fiction or self-help book someone reads, it's easy to imagine that reader becoming a lifetime fan of Gladwell, for everything is laid out perfectly, in that unique Gladwell style. But read it with an open mind, and a tiny bit of skepticism, and you will come across some interesting interpretations of certain events.
And finally, as to the concepts of outliers itself: obviously the environmental factors - both positive and negative - are going to impact any persons success or failures.
It's interesting to see if there are any relationships or patterns in these factors, but, personally, I think it is a bit of a stretch. We should not let things like that affect the way we want to organize our lives. It might even go as far as to show you some hidden opportunities around you, how they managed to overcome their difficulties and how to utilize whatever resources available, and to provide some motivation.
But that is not the point of the book is it Dec 30, Adam rated it it was amazing. People are criticizing this book because it is not a journal article. Well guess what: we're not all sociologists. I have read plenty of journal articles in my own field law. I'm in no position to read journal articles in fields outside my own.
Having a well-written piece of mass-market writing is just the thing I need to access this information. Another criticism of the book is that Gladwell is the "master of the anecdote. Every survey even a methodologically perfect one is necessarily un-abstract and anecdotal: it is based on survey research from particular people, and there's no way to derive abstract rules governing society from that like math.
This notion of how Gladwell is all anecdotal bothers me. So what? If a good anecdote gets you to look at a situation in a new way or makes a powerful point, that's excellent! View 2 comments. Oct 01, Michael Perkins rated it it was ok Shelves: overrated. The term I've coined for books such as these is "the illusion of erudition.
In a paper in the British Jou The term I've coined for books such as these is "the illusion of erudition. In a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the lead author of the original study about the practice time of elite violinists, K. Ericsson himself never used the number 10, or the term "rule. Ericsson extended his study to sports. Author David Espstein reports on the results next four paragraphs In fact, in absolutely every single study of sports expertise, there is a tremendous range of hours of practice logged by athletes who reach the same level, and very rarely do elite performers log 10, hours of sport-specific practice prior to reaching the top competitive plane, often competing in a number of other sports— and acquiring a range of other athletic skills— before zeroing in on one.
Studies of athletes have tended to find that the top competitors require far less than 10, hours of deliberate practice to reach elite status. According to the scientific literature, the average sport-specific practice hours to reach the international levels in basketball, field hockey, and wrestling are closer to 2,, 4,, and 6,, respectively.
In a sample of Australian women competing in netball sort of like basketball but without dribbling or backboards , arguably the best player in the world at the time, Vicki Wilson, had compiled only hours of practice when she made the national team. Even in this age of hyperspecialization in sports, some rare individuals become world-class athletes, and even world champions, in sports from running to rowing with less than a year or two of training.
As with studies of chess players, in all sports and skills, the only real rule is that there is a tremendous natural range. I've coached enough youth sports to know there needs to be some base talent to build on for a young person to excel. I've also seen many year olds who were stars at that age, but who faded by age 16, no matter how many hours they put in. I've coached youth sports for years. You can also use ILLiad to request chapter scans and articles. Phrase Searching You can use double quotes to search for a series of words in a particular order.
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He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York. From the bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia: discover Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough debut and explore the science behind viral trends in business, marketing, and human behavior. From the 1 bestselling author of The Bomber Mafia, the landmark book that has revolutionized the way we understand leadership and decision making. In his breakthrough….
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