| "In OUTLIERS, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it al by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are FROM that we unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't..." In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
Annotation:
Cultural critic Malcolm Gladwell applies his best trend watching insights and peripatetic methodology to the biq question of why some people achieve success and others do not. These Outliers, as he calls them--successful people who stand out from the rest of the crowd--may be business people, artists, athletes, entertainers, scientists, or work in other fields. In a variation of the nature versus nurture debates, Gladwell seeks answers in culture, environment, and upbringing. Without seeking simple formulas, he examines a range of artifacts--IQ tests, for example, and birth-date data--as he digs for answers in a book that draws on psychology, business, and sociology, and which explains difficult concepts in an accessible manner. THE OUTLIERS confirms that Malcolm Gladwell, here a public intellectual, is himself an Outlier. ||||.
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Author Bio| Malcolm Gladwell | | In his Acknowledgments to THE TIPPING POINT, Malcolm Gladwell tells how he got his dream job at the New Yorker magazine: a freelancer, he wrote a piece (which he later expanded to THE TIPPING POINT) and the editor at the time, Tina Brown, hired him "to my surprise and delight." At the New Yorker he is obligated to produce 40-50,000 words per year, he has said on his website, but he is free to write "about everything under the sun." Gladwell's two books, THE TIPPING POINT and BLINK spent many weeks on the New York Times hardcover and paperback best seller lists--sometimes appearing simultaneously. His engaging forays into pop culture and everyday life are revealing keyholes into how we live today, and since he is a good explainer he just makes things more interesting than they usually appear. Gladwell has a history degree from Trinity College, University of Toronto, and he spent years working for the Washington Post. |
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