2018 in Books #1 : Outliers

My membership at the Evanston Public Library is my best-worst decision. Best, because I now have e-books delivered right into my Kindle without having me trudge in snow to borrow or return a book and the worst, because it is going to make me lazy and unfit. 

Cut to the chase, Outliers has been a good start to 2018. At a modest 300 odd pages, Malcolm Gladwell writes a deeply researched and critically analysed account of success stories that we know of. 

| The biggest takeaway you can get from Outliers is the "other side" of stories, which are often ignored for the sake of glorification of the achievement. |

It was enjoyable to see how tiny, seemingly inconsequential factors can help a person go a long way. A popular example the book talks about is Bill Gates' rise as a billionaire when he was a college dropout. 

Treating his story superficially has led to popularizing the opinion, "hey, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were college drop outs and look at them now! College drop outs do succeed!" 

| "Success is what sociologists like to call 'accumulative advantage'."- Malcolm Gladwell |

What Gladwell does is tear that opinion apart and launches an introspection into why they could drop out of college, how the economy was positioned that year and the tremendous efforts they took to achieve what we know them for today. 

He does this with few more cases which take one of two paths;  exploring the opportunities around the instances or the legacy and culture of the people involved. The questions he asks, what helped these successful people? Was it their habits? Was it their birth date? Was it their culture and its inherent trait that does not leave one's personality? I found this very engaging for the first few cases after which the writing style takes a very repetitive turn that got rather tedious. It also makes one cynical of all the accomplishments we have heard of - strip away all the celebrity from it, you're left with what looks like only hard work and some luck. On the upside, the recurrent questions get ingrained into your head, helping you apply them in future examples and hence, think critically. (A line I never thought I'd say but there was something to glean from this book)

Where I think the book could have been improved, was to have had a success story on women. It's not just the feminist in me speaking, but a valuable addition to the cases would be to investigate if the outlying winning factors are different for the sexes. 

Despite its shortcomings, I would happily recommend Outliers for those who wish to see what went on on the back end of many successful tales we heard of. For those who want something better from Gladwell, make sure you read The Tipping Point. It's one of my favourite books and I can write a long review on that, but some other time.