Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
View on GoodreadsA January 1 age cutoff, and elite Canadian hockey rosters full of players born early in the year: Gladwell's case is that success owes more to accumulated opportunity, timing and inherited culture than to talent. How much of that rests on cherry-picked anecdotes, as Steven Pinker charged?
Core ideas
- Opportunity compounds: When you're born and what you get access to matter, from Americans born in the 1830s to Bill Gates at a teletype terminal in 1968.
- The 10,000-hour rule: Drawn from Anders Ericsson's research and illustrated by the Beatles in Hamburg, though a later meta-analysis found deliberate practice explains only part of performance.
- Legacy travels: In his account, Korean Air crashes trace to deferential cockpit communication and Asian math performance to rice farming, sections critics have challenged.
Published2008
Pages309
ISBN9780316017923
ReadNov 2019
