Outliers-The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell defied the conventional explanations for success in this book "Outliers". When he wrote this book, he was already famous for his previous bestseller publications in "The Tipping Point" and "Blink", which I shall discuss later. Malcolm is a staff writer at the New Yorker and prior to this, he was a business and science reporter at Washington Post.

Outliers, as they are described in his book, refer to extremely successful people. They are outside the norms we would accept for the definition for successful people. They are even better. While most stories about successful people would talk about hard work, resilience in the face of hardship and persistence, Gladwell takes the story in another direction. He tells us that if we truly want to know how and why some people thrive and become immensely successful, we should look around them, at their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. It's not what we would think, like how the Chinese and Indians would look into the Book of Knowledge or consult a priest on numerology and astrology. Instead we should look at the opportunities offered by that period of time and how social patterns and decisions made by the parents and the subjects themselves.

The lives of Outliers follow an unexpected pattern of logic and Gladwell helps us follow this pattern with his meticulous examples. There are similarities in the paths taken by the Beatles and Bill Gates, and even Mozart. And using social patterns, he even explains why aviation accidents happen more to certain airlines. And also why Asian students are beating the daylights out of their Western counterparts in the study of mathematics.

In a way I see Malcolm Gladwell as a social scientist. This book is not the normal human development book. Yes, it explores patterns to understand why certain people are extremely successful. It explores our human potential. Though a non-fiction book that contains some statistics, it's far from being boring. I was riveted to the book from start to finish within a few days.