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Wow! I realized, while scrolling through my blog, that I had left Outliers (an outstanding book) by Malcolm Gladwell unaddressed and simply noted with a supposed “midway check.” I am a little lazy at the moment to write a detailed blog-ly response to the book in my tone and my writing, but I am happy to provide you a book response I have written on GoodReads and also submitted as a Piece Of Writing to my own English teacher at school (haha).

Here it is. You can also find it here on Goodreads.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a book taking a second and closer look at success in a different way than we usually dismiss it: why do people succeed? What makes people succeed? And is it really just hard work and grit that gets you to the top? In his bestselling book, Outliers, Gladwell takes a closer look at what really matters when it comes to success, and why it matters. The lives of successful men and women, whom he calls outliers—Steve Jobs, Robert Oppenheimer, Olympic class hockey players—are all dissected in this book in a way that you will look at success again at a different angle. He tells us why Asians seem to be better at math, why your culture matters when it comes to how likely a plane will crash, and why a man with an IQ higher than Einstein’s known IQ is working on a farm out in the country without a college degree. What is the real key to success, and what governs it? Gladwell makes an attempt at cracking the code, or at least figuring out a pattern to the infinite variety of success stories.
In the past, I have read one of Gladwell’s other bestselling novels, titled Blink. It is a book about snap judgments and first impressions, another quite interesting book researching the psychology of human behavior. In comparison with Outliers, however, it seems that Outliers rises above Blink in a way that it is much more applicable to our lives.
Outliers—and I hesitate to specify on the statistics or the ‘discoveries’ uncovered in this book to save your reading experience for later—is about success. It is something we all strive for, at least to some degree, and it is something that we have always thought of as that “thing” we get when we work hard, we spend time on it, and we ‘never give up.’ There is nothing morally wrong with this idea. In fact, it is a great motto to follow throughout your life. However, what lies between this idea of “incessant hard work” and real success is that evidence, lives, and research shows that it has never been only hard work that have gotten the people in the newspapers or TV where they are today. It is a combination of luck, of—yes—hard work, of cultural background, of your parents, of your childhood, and an infinite number of variables all entwined in such a way that in reality, success is neither predictable nor moldable. It is something that you might wish for but cannot create deliberately.
Many of the points Gladwell makes in this book, such as the 10,000 hour rule (stating that to become a professional, a true ‘master’ at a certain art or profession, you must have spent at least 10,000 hours doing that art or profession), have made a pretty deep impression on me as a reader. It really opened my eyes to the mystic monstrosity of the world and the forces of nature. Though that sounds quite cliché and otherworldy, reading Outliers really gives you an idea of how uncontrollable one’s future is and how much people have put behind a success story. Whoever you think of as successful—whether you take them for granted or not—have all had a difficult and arduous journey before it lasting for years longer than you might expect. Not only this, but Gladwell proves that luck plays a significant role in success. When you are born, such as what year and what month, are very crucial to your potential to reach success. (Reading about this the first time really astounded me. Olympic class hockey players, to give you an idea, are mostly born in January by a very disproportionate degree. Not only this, but successful men of the Silicon Valley have all been born somewhere around or between 1952 and 1958. It is an extremely interesting idea.) But what Gladwell also proves is that your luck isn’t sometimes just something of fate that you pray for, but rather a passing opportunity that one must be prepared to catch upon discovery. We can take away from this book the idea that by understanding your culture, spending time on your passions, and remembering to be persistent in what you do will help you get farther down the road towards success. In the end, it is passion, dedication, luck, grit, background, and persistence that takes you far enough to know that you are an outlier.

I have found that I have a liking for books that question the morality of man and such. Books that question what is taken for granted? They are quite mind-stimulating, to put it in a very odd phrase. It gets me thinking. I like that.

But putting all formal book reviews and wordy explanations aside, what I mean to say is READ OUTLIERS.

It is simply an amazing book that gives you a completely different angle on success and the road to it.

I will leave you there. Adieu.