Mizi Book Review: Outliers: The Story of Success

Now lets see me try to do a book review. I will start with one of my favorite authors; Malcolm Gladwell. Having written for The New Yorker, he written 2 books before Outliers; Blink and The Tipping Point. I like the way of his style of writing which is not that heavy and easy to understand to promote new and fresh point of view on how we see the world. His work usually is backed up by lots of research and studies done by various parties usually by Universities and Colleges.

Now in Outliers: The Story of Success, basically it tells what the title said, the story of success. It is like part autobiography and part social analysis. Some of the big names mention are Bill Gates, The Beatles, J Robert Oppenheimer (the leader of the Manhattan Project on which brings the gift of the Atom Bomb to the world) and also some of the obscure name such as the wasted genius Christopher Langan. In the fashion of Gladwell's previous work, this books explore the miniscule and often overlook details that actually play a much major role towards the factor of success(or failure) for these individuals.

There are 2 major underlying themes there are explore in this book; cumulative opportunity and minimum hours of practice to achieve mastery aka the 10,000 hrs rule. The former is about for each successful individual, some point in their lives there is some event that either provides them the opportunity for them to achieve mastery or to apply their skill to a such an effect that benefited them the most. For example with Bill Gates, Gladwell theorize that having access to a computer that The Mothers Club of Lakeside School bought for Gates school when he was 13 in the late 60s, enabled him to become expert in programming and achieve the 10,000 hours rule. By this time, the computer industry boom was about to begin and he was in the right time plus well prepared. In a similar fashion, The Beatles, in their formulative years used to play 8 hours per day in Hamburg  strip clubs for 2 years. And many other examples of obscure opportunities involved are explore in this book.

We also got to find out about why air crashes occurred  and the superiority of the Chinese language in Mathematics. The book ends with Gladwell telling a bit about his Jamaican mother background.

When I bought this book, I kept reading it without putting it down for long. That is how much interesting is this book for me. It kinda refresh your perspective and makes me wonder when I observed my surroundings (working environment), "How did that guy get to where he is now?" A truly wonderful read.