Bill Romanos Blog

Outliers is an excellent book about some of the often overlooked factors that drive success. He investigates factors other than the personal meritocratic view of success. You may not agree with all of his conclusions, but the book does help bring to your attention factors that may not always be taken into account.

Malcolm Gladwell argues through a variety of stories that structural factors often drive who becomes a success – who becomes an “outlier.” For example, Canadian superstar hockey players are often born in the first three months of the year. They often rise to the top because they are the most physically mature of their peers and thus get selected for extra training and better leagues and this intense training that occurs over years helps these players rise to the top of the sport of hockey.

Mr. Gladwell also shows how the year in which a person is born also determines in certain cases the persons chance for success. This is often driven by demographic troughs in which there are fewer people competing to get into elite institutions. He also discusses Jewish immigrants and their experience in the New York garment district, New York City lawyers, and also a small town in Pennsylvania in which heart disease is virtually non-existent, among other examples of cases in which structural factors dominate over our conventional views of personal success or accomplishment.

He also discusses experts and expert performance and how it usually takes 10,000 hours for a person to become a true expert. He ties early selection of young people for “gifted” and other programs and how how such early selection earmarks the person for additional learning, training, etc. enabling them to achieve the 10,000 hours of “practice” needed to become an expert.

If you are interested in understanding community, sociology, personal success, structural anthropology, or are just interested in learning generally, this is an excellent book. It provides excellent insights into how factors that we have neglected to take into account of our analysis of “success” and what drives people or allows people to become very successful or to become an expert or other “outlier.” Just like Mr. Gladwell’s other books “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” which became best sellers, this book brings to the forefront of our understanding new concepts that we may not have been aware of and thus is a welcome addition to our public discussion and debate about structuring institutions, providing people with “second chances” for selection, and other opportunities for “corrected” individual selection these institutions should undertake to select from a larger pool of people. I highly recommend this book.

See Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers on Amazon.com by clicking this Link.