“Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all”
Malcom Gladwell
I came around Outliers as a recommendation of the CEO of the company I work for and if I had to put my opinion in a line, I would say that ‘Outliers is not the book you’re expecting’. The book offers a completely different view about success and ‘self-made’ characters.
The book’s general idea is that personal explanations of success don’t work, that people don’t rise from nothing and that we owe something to parentage and patronage. Through the book Gladwell provides multiple (really, multiple!) real stories to proof his theory.
The author clings to the idea that Outliers’ stories are about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it and that their success was not just of their own making, but a product of the world in which they grew up.
The author makes some interesting points about the importance of:
- The role of ‘practical intelligence’ or savviness, the set of skills that people learn from their families and include things like ‘knowing what to say to whom, when to say it and how to say it for maximum effect’.
- The advantage of the ‘sense of entitlement’ that ‘concerted cultivation’ middle-class parenting style develops. This style attempts to actively foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills by exposing the child to a constant shifting set of experiences where they learn teamwork, how to cope in highly structured settings, how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when they needs to.
- The ‘culture of honor’ hypothesis which asserts that cultural legacies matter and determine our ‘individualism collectivism scale’ (how much people look after themselves), ‘uncertainty avoidance’ (how well people tolerate ambiguity) and ‘power distance’ (how much people value and respects authority).
I loved the Outliers’ conclusion in which Gladwell arguments that in order to understand outliers we have to look around them—at their culture and community and family. The book just makes us understand how much of a group project success is!
Unapologetic Thoughts 