Jennie Bourgeois

June 16, 2009

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

June 16th 2009 Posted to Books

I have been reading Outliers on my Kindle. This is written by the author of The Tipping Point which I also read a few months ago. The research on facts and figures that was done in writting this book is really substantial.

All throughout the book there is story after story of successful people who have risen to their level of success and have become an “outlier” in their particular field due to a wide variety of reasons other than just their own hard work and determination.

One of the chapters focused on the reasons for numerous airline crashes over the past several decades. There were numerous stories in detail about specific airline tragedies and how they occurred. This was probably not the best chapter to be reading while flying home from Knoxville. Being on an airplane reading about all of the failures was quite a bit uncomfortable.

One the really important points made in the book that had a big impact on me was the concept of the “magic of meaningful work”. Gladwell went into great detail explaining examples of individuals who work exceedingly hard for a purpose. He contrasted that to the concept of the peasants working under the domineering landlord system in earlier years. These peasants did not have nor understand the “magic of meaningful work”. I see examples of this concept every day with people who understand this and those that do not.

In reading some reviews of Gladwell’s book on the Internet, I see that some individuals disagree with his conclusions. Some people seem to think that Gladwell was saying that talent, skill, hard work and dedication had nothing to do with an individual’s success. I don’t think that is what he was saying in this book. I believe he over all point that there are ALSO other factors that are involved such as birthday, ethnicity, social class, etc. that are important in determining an individual’s success as well. He was saying that those other factors play a much bigger role in our lives that we often realize.

Here are a couple of links to other blogs that had some very detailed reviews on the book Outliers.