Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers – The Story of Success is an international best seller. There are scores of articles and reviews by “professional” book reviewers available for this book, but I'll still add my take to the pile of information available on this book.

Outliers explores the role circumstances have in the creating success. The basic thesis is that although talent and hard work are certainly necessary for success, they are a bit over rated when reviewing what creates success. As the thesis goes, circumstances and even luck can have just as important a role in creating great success, or outliers.

Besides what I gleaned from this book, I know little about Malcolm Gladwell. I have not read any of his other best sellers. However, based on what I learned from this book, I would say that Gladwell is a statistician and a sociologist. He uses data to make correlations, then draws conclusions about the cause and effect of these correlations.

Outliers was quite interesting, and somewhat eye opening. It was fascinating to see the pieces that had to all fall in just the right place to create a great success like a Bill Gates or even a Malcolm Gladwell.
The tone of the book was tough to pinpoint. One of the messages of the book was that there are other factors out of your control that determine your success. Regardless of how hard you work, or how talented you are, you will have a difficult time becoming a true success outlier without good fortune. For example, if you are a young kid starting hockey in Canada, even if you have great natural talent, you will likely not get anywhere unless you were born in one of the first 4 months of the year (You’ll have to read the book to see the reason for this.). At the same time, there is some message of hope in the book. Gladwell contends that talent is overrated. He believes that in many cases, people viewed as great talents were really of average talent but through hard work and lucky circumstances, were able to become successful. Therefore, there is some hope in believing that although you may not be born with great talent, you can still become a success outlier. However, I believe this hope message is drowned out by the fact that Gladwell puts such a large emphasis on luck as a key factor. It’s a little disconcerting to become aware of the fact that regardless of your hard word and talent, whether or not you become successful is in large part due to luck. Even if it is likely true to some degree, it’s still a tough message to face into. I think we all internally know that circumstances are a big factor in life, but to have it laid out in black and white with supporting data can be a bit depressing, unless of course you are one of those on the good side of the luck equation (which is all relative)!

One point that is critical to understanding Outliers is that Gladwell makes generalizations based on data. He does a good job pointing out that he deals in just generalizations, not hard rules. For example, it may be easier to become a hockey star in Canada if you were to be born in February, but not impossible if born in November. One always needs to be careful when making generalizations about people. Gladwell points this out.

One criticism of Gladwell is that he does not discuss any data contradicting his conclusions. This is an understandable criticism, but it’s also understandable why Gladwell leaves most contradictory data out. His intention is to write a book in everyday terms, not create an academic research paper.

There’s a good reason why Outliers is a best seller. I highly recommend this book.