Outliers: The Story of Success Book Summary & Review

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success is the third non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brownand Company. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success.

Generally well received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book.

Outliers has two parts: "Part One: Opportunity" contains five chapters, and "Part Two: Legacy" has four. The book also contains an Introduction and Epilogue. 'Outliers' is defined by Gladwell as people who do not fit into our normal understanding of achievement.

Outliers deals with exceptional people, especially those who are smart, rich, and successful, and those who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically plausible. In the introduction, Gladwell lays out the purpose of Outliers: "It's not enough to ask what successful people are like… It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't." 

Throughout the publication, he discusses how family, culture, and friendship each play a role in an individual's success, and he constantly asks whether successful people deserve the praise that we give them.

Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities.

We place such a high value on individuals and their “self-made” achievements that we often willfully ignore other factors.
The “self-made man” is a myth – a very, very popular myth.

Once you reach a certain threshold, increased abilities no longer help you succeed. Though innate qualities are important, being 6’10” tall doesn’t guarantee you a million-dollar basketball contract, and having a sky-high IQ doesn’t automatically mean a Nobel Prize. Why is this? Qualities that foster success – like height in basketball players or quantitative intelligence in mathematicians – have a “threshold.” For example, after reaching a certain height, an extra couple of inches don’t make that much difference for a basketball player.

Though talent is certainly a key ingredient in the recipe for success, hard work seems to be at least as important, if not more so. Bill Gates spent a lot of time learning computer programming. The Beatles spent a lot of time on stage. Though they were also extraordinarily talented individuals, it was extensive practice that made them truly world-class. To achieve world-class mastery at anything, studies show you need to spend a “critical minimum” amount of time – around 10,000 hours – practicing.

Gladwell explains that reaching the 10,000-Hour Rule, which he considers the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years.

Of course, not everyone has the opportunity to spend this much time practicing something. First of all, you need the opportunity to start early so you can get in as much practice as possible and secure a head start on the competition. Also, you or your family has to have the resources to support you; it’s hard to find time for work or chores when you’re spending 40 hours a week trying to become a world-famous violinist.
Depending on what you want to do, you might also need access to expensive state-of-the-art equipment.

Encouragement from family, friends, coaches, teachers and kind strangers you meet on the street helps too.
If you’re lucky, like Bill Gates or the Beatles, you’ll have all these things. However, many people don’t, so they effectively lack the opportunity to achieve world-class mastery in their chosen fields.

How you’re brought up can radically impact how successful you become. After you reach a skills “threshold,” natural abilities stop mattering in your quest for success. A far more important factor is whether you have practical intelligence. Practical intelligence is “procedural” knowledge: knowing how to interpret and work social situations to get what you want – in other words, knowing who to ask what, and when. The ability to interact with and negotiate with authority figures can help inch people closer to their goals. This knowledge is not innate.

Sociologist Annette Lareau found that wealthier parents instill in their children a feeling of “entitlement” more often than lower-class parents do. In general, they do this by paying more attention to their children, or by at least providing their children with enriching activities that promote intellectual growth. They teach their children to demand respect and to “customize” a situation to suit to their needs. In other words, they teach their kids practical intelligence.

By contrast, poorer parents are often intimidated by authority and let their children follow a pattern of “natural growth” – there’s less pushing, prodding and encouraging than in wealthier families. This means children from poorer households are less likely to be taught practical intelligence, which radically decreases their chances for success.

The key message in this book is that no man or woman is an island. Apart from talent and hard work extraordinary success is the result of an often-unlikely series of opportunities, lucky breaks and occurrences that combine to create the precise conditions that allow such achievement. Success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky". 

You can buy this book at Amazon.