Malcolm Gladwell is back, much to the delight of the legions of fans he won with The Tipping Point and Blink (not to mention a trove of articles for The New Yorker). In his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the frizzy-haired cult hero shines his always-questioning light on extremely successful people and asks what makes them so. (An outlier is something or someone that is outside of the normal, expected range.) But he's not looking at what they eat or how efficient they are or even how talented they are. Instead, he's looking from where they came.
Specifically, Gladwell makes the case that the rags-to-riches story is generally a myth, and that by looking closer at successful people you can see the advantages they received that others did not. The advantages may be when they were born, where they live, their ethnicity, and other factors. While it's easy to guess that someone born with a silver spoon in his or her mouth has a greater chance of success, Gladwell also offers examples where hatred and discrimination actually sowed the seeds for extreme success.
Gladwell's gift is in transforming obscure intellectual and psychological studies by combining and re-shaping and re-telling them in new, provocative ways. He suggests patterns or themes that others miss. Outliers is no exception, as Gladwell draws almost exclusively from the research of others, but puts that research together in ways that will keep the average reader hooked.
Gladwell's first compelling example comes in the form of the top junior Canadian hockey players, who disproportionately are born in the early months of the year. Why? The age cutoff for hockey is January 1, so when players started out as small children, those born at the beginning of the year were almost a year older than those in their age brackets who were born at the end of the year. These older boys would be unfairly seen as bigger, better players, and would be groomed as champions, getting extra practice time and attention - not because they were necessarily the best, but because the quirk of the age cutoff had given them a built-in advantage from day one.
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