Outliers: The Story of Success

The main tenet of Outliers is that there is a logic behind why some people become successful, and it has more to do with legacy and opportunity than high IQ. In his latest book, New Yorker contributor Gladwell casts his inquisitive eye on those who have risen meteorically to the top of their fields, analyzing developmental patterns and searching for a common thread. The author asserts that there is no such thing as a self-made man, that "the true origins of high achievement" lie instead in the circumstances and influences of one's upbringing, combined with excellent timing. The Beatles had Hamburg in 1960-62; Bill Gates had access to an ASR-33 Teletype in 1968. Both put in thousands of hours-Gladwell posits that 10,000 is the magic number-on their craft at a young age, resulting in an above-average head start.

Gladwell makes sure to note that to begin with, these individuals possessed once-in-a-generation talent in their fields. He simply makes the point that both encountered the kind of "right place at the right time" opportunity that allowed them to capitalize on their talent, a delineation that often separates moderate from extraordinary success. This is also why Asians excel at mathematics-their culture demands it. If other countries schooled their children as rigorously, the author argues, scores would even out.

Gladwell also looks at "demographic luck," the effect of one's birth date. He demonstrates how being born in the decades of the 1830s or 1930s proved an enormous advantage for any future entrepreneur, as both saw economic booms and demographic troughs, meaning that class sizes were small, teachers were overqualified, universities were looking to enroll and companies were looking for employees.

In short, possibility comes "from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with." This theme appears throughout the varied anecdotes, but is it groundbreaking information? At times it seems an exercise in repackaged carpe diem, especially from a mind as attuned as Gladwell's. Nonetheless, the author's lively storytelling and infectious enthusiasm make it an engaging, perhaps even inspiring, read.

Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is another of my favorites in this genre. I recommend it strongly because, unlike Gladwell's book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 shows you how to become an outlier...

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell seeks to disabuse us of the notion that genius and greatness are predominantly a function of innate ability and IQ. He rightly notes that while IQ is certainly a contributor, it reaches a "point of diminishing returns" after a while: once people score about 130, IQ becomes less important and "intangibles" (my term) become more important.

The book, then, focuses on what these "intangibles" are. Gladwell suggests that things like what income level, culture, and time of a child's birth are important contributors to success, as well as a person's tenacity and agility. As the last of these is the least conventional, think of it this way: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many other computer masterminds would likely not have distinguiished themselves were they born 10 years earlier (as they would not have been exposed to computers in high-school/college, and would have been in their mid-thirties by the time computers really took hold, likely already in other careers by that point in their lives.)

How does culture matter? Think about the discrepancy between how many days per year American children spend in school (180) versus Asian students (280), and how many more social expectaitons Asian students are borne into? Certianly this will affect academic and other achievement.

Now, I should point out that Gladwell is quite adept at anecdotal story telling and is much less adept at statistical analysis. As such, he could be justly accused of overstating his case (and maybe even finding patterns where he wants to see them, rather than where they exist.) Gladwell is definitely writing for the popular market so anyone wanting good "back up" of his arguments may find themselves disappointed by his cherry-picking of examples.

That said, Gladwell's book contains some interesting and provocative ideas, especially for educators and those concerned with education. His last chapter - about the KIPP schools - is a fascinating plea for American schools to infuse more rigor (and quantity) to the educational school year. As a main part of Gladwell's thesis is that how hard one works (and is willing to work) is endemic to one's likelihood of success, we set students up for failure by not expecting them to work as hard as other countries expect of their students.

For a fun read which introduces some interesting ideas, Gladwell's "Outliers" is a decent book. Those who want a little more scholarly meat may come away disappointed.

Gladwell has done it again...sort of. I would have categorized this book as a 4 or 5 star read like his previous two installments--Blink and The Tipping Point, except he lost a few originality points this time around.

Gladwell's knack for making a reader say "huh, interesting..." is something for other writers to marvel at. I'm convinced that he could pen a book called "Green: It's the color of grass," and he would write it in such a way that would inspire most of us to say "huh...who knew?!?"

But in the case of Outliers the "huh..." factor has little to do with the ideas found in the book, and are almost exclusively the result of Gladwell's keen sense of how to make the ordinary and mundane sound exciting and new. This is especially true in the two chapters devoted to debunking the myth that intelligence is the key to success. Unfortunately, Dan Goleman beat him to the punch way back in 1995 with his book "Emotional Intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ." With a quick sleight of hand, Gladwell cites Robert Sternberg's label of "practical intelligence," instead of calling it emotional intelligence. But let's be honest, here, the only difference is Goleman says "tem-ay-toe," and Gladwell says "tem-ah-toe."

The other flaw is that nothing in it is terribly useful for practical application. It's no secret to anyone in the business of hiring that most selection techniques are abysmal predictors of on-the-job success. What we are left with as a takeaway from Outliers is that factors of chance like the ability to practice a skill for 10,000 hours--mostly during childhood--is the key to predicting future success. Get your kids started today...as long as you know when the next Industrial Revolution or Internet Age is going to occur. Aside from emotional intelligence (aka "practical intelligence") most of these are factors that we just can't do much about. Unfortunately, we already knew that.

Alas, however, Malcolm Gladwell is a professional writer, and not a professional researcher. If readers keep that in mind, they won't be too disappointed by the methods or originality of the research. His job is to weave together an interesting story, which is something Gladwell does exceedingly well. If all you want is some good entertainment and fodder for cocktail party discussions, Outliers might make a nice addition to your bookshelves.

Nick Tasler is the author of The Impulse Factor: Why Some of Us Play It Safe and Others Risk It All

Gladwell seems to have perfected a formula:
1. Latch onto a catchy concept.
2. Think of a great, catchy one- or two-word title.
3. Write a thin, small book.
4. Start your book with a decent analysis of some facts that support your catchy thesis, hook the reader, then let the book slide into a series of anecdotes and stories. Don't "prove" your thesis, just illustrate it.
5. Charge a lot for it (in both absolute dollars and cost-per-word).
6. Get a terrific, minimalist cover design.
7. Let the royalties and accolades roll in.

Each of Gladwell's three books ("Tipping Point," "Blink," and "Outliers") follows this formula. It's a proven winner, and at the end of this book, he goes into full rooting mode for another hit in his Acknowledgements: "[A colleague] and I have been two for two so far, and...here's hoping we go three for three." Wow. Let's just set up a toll-booth.

I don't agree with the five-star reviews. The book is just too thin, anecdotal, and un-analytical to be taken very seriously. On the cover flap, it says that "Tipping Point" changed the way we understand the world, "Blink" changed the way we think about thinking, and "Outliers" will transform the way we understand success. Uh, no. They are all decent books with provocative theses, but none has enough "there" there to change the way most people think about anything.

I also don't agree with the one-star reviews. Gladwell's topics are provocative, his books are easy reads (this one took me just a few hours on vacation, and I'm not that fast a reader), and the stories and anecdotes are interesting. I found myself pretty convinced that birthdates are important to hockey success (so he hooked me with the first part of the book), but each successive chapter became less fact-based and more story-based. That said, it's a nice easy read, and I learned a thing or two. His books are not worthless.

So I give it a nice easy 88-mph down the middle three stars. I must admit, I admire the success he has had with his formula. He makes it look pretty easy.

A criticism common to both Malcolm Gladwell's previous books, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, was that while they were packed with interesting, well told, anecdotes there was no consistent underlying theme to the stories; no particular lesson to be drawn. For example, of the many anecdotes recounted about "thin slicing" some (such as an art expert's ability to instantly assess the bona fides of a statue) suggested it was a special and important skill while others (an impulsive police decision to pursue and shoot dead a innocent bystander) suggested quite the opposite. You were left with the impression that, well, there are these things called snap judgements, and sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don't.

Clearly Malcolm Gladwell has taken those reservations to heart: in Outliers he has been scrupulous to sketch out an integrated underlying thesis and then (for the most part) array his anecdotes - which, as usual, are interesting enough - in support of it.

Unfortunately for him, the theory is a lemon. Nonetheless, the flyleaf is hubristic (and unimaginative) enough to claim "This book really will change the way you think about your life". It's not done that for me, but it has changed the way I think about Malcolm Gladwell's writing. And not for the better.

Gladwell has looked at some psychological research into success and genius and has concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, success isn't to be explained by raw talent. The evidence suggests that genuinely exceptional performers, in whatever field - these are the titular "outliers" - can be identified by a combination of unique and unusual *opportunity* and *commitment* to achieve. It isn't talent, but graft and the odd lucky break. Hmm.

A common thread, Gladwell claims, is that most "world class experts", be they "composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, what have you ..." have put in 10,000 hours of practice before really achieving success. So, as the paradigm case goes, the Beatles weren't just in the right place at the right time (though clearly they were), but were instead preternaturally prepared for it by their grueling stint playing hundreds of eight-hour shows in Hamburg, an experience which afforded them both the necessary period of time and unusual opportunity to gain musical proficiency.

The first quibble here is to note that (even allowing for the patent fantasy that the Beatles played eight-hours non stop each night), on Gladwell's own figures, the Hamburg experience - which didn't involve Ringo Starr - still left the band roughly 8,000 hours short of their necessary 10,000. In any case attributing the Beatles' success to their (undisputed) musical proficiency indicates the degree to which Gladwell misses the point, both about rock 'n' roll (wherein neither concerted effort nor musical acumen has often had much to do with initial commercial success - just ask Elvis or the Rolling Stones) and the quality of the data itself. Gladwell's theory suffers from survivor bias: it starts with an undisputed result (the Beatles - clearly an outlier) and works back looking for evidence to support its hypothesis and takes whatever is there: easy enough to do since the "evidence" is definable only in terms of the subsequently occuring success. In less polite circles this is called revisionism.

There will, after all, be no record of the poor loser who spent 10,000 hours at his fretboard and who squandered a wealth of opportunity through ineptitude or bad luck, because, by definition, he never caught the light. Even if you grant Gladwell his theory - and I'm not inclined to - the most that can be said is that he's found a *correlation* between graft and success. But to confuse correlation with causation is a cardinal sin of interpretation (see Stephen Jay Gould's splendid The Mismeasure of Man for a compelling explanation of this fallacy) unless you have independent supporting grounds to justify the causal chain. Gladwell offers none: The Fab Four (well, Fab Three plus Pete Best) may have become a tighter band in Germany, but as Gladwell acknowledges there were many Liverpool bands in Hamburg at the time, all presumably clocking up eight hours non-stop (yeah, right) per night, and none of the others made the cover of Rolling Stone then, or has done since.

Much of the rest of Gladwell's patter is similarly glib: look at any "success story" long enough and you're bound to find something in its past you can designate as the crucial 10,000 hours. But to imply - as Gladwell seems to - that it isn't special talent but nothing more than sheer grit and unique opportunity that creates Outliers seems fatuous, and liable to needlessly encourage a class of plodders who will end up very disappointed (and resentful of M. Gladwell, Esq.) in 10 years' time. It struck me when I listened to him speak in London last month that the 10,000 hours might just as easily be confirmation, rather than falsification, of the presence of raw talent. If you take two violinists, one tone deaf and the other unusually gifted, all else being equal, who is more likely to stick at it for the ten years it takes to achieve concert level proficiency?

To be sure there are some fascinating lessons to be drawn here, but precisely at the point where Gladwell allows himself to drift off the moorings of his underlying theory: ethnic theory of plane crashes, which seemed to establish very little about outliers even on his argument, is cogent (and in these melting markets, timely) caution as to the risks of autocratic behaviour. Towards the end of the book Gladwell reaches some uneasy conclusions that, based on the extraordinary results of Asian schoolchildren in mathematics, that US schools should effectively abandon summer holidays and have children attend school all year round, like they might if they were working in a rice paddy. I'm not convinced that more school (as opposed to better parenting) is the answer.

It was my fortune to be reading Steve Gould's classic tome on scientific sceptism at the same time I read (and listened to) Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's prescriptions are analogous with the flawed IQ testing programmes Gould so elegantly takes to task: the hypothesis comes first, and the intellectual process behind it is the search for evidence in support of it rather than a dispassionate attempt to falsify. It is hard to imagine how one would go about falsifying (or proving, other than anecdotally) Gladwell's theory and even harder to conceive what prospective use Gladwell's learning, if true, could be. Seeing as the "golden opportunities" can only be identified with hindsight - once your outlier is already lying out there, this feels like the sort of junk science with all the trappings - and utility - of 20:20 rear vision.

Olly Buxton

I purchased this book thinking that it would be as well-researched and written as his previous two works, "The Tipping Point" and "Blink." Less than a third of a way through the book, however, I began to become concerned that Gladwell's enthusiasm for his topic had blurred his view of important related factors.

As a statistician, I was troubled by his apparent lack of understanding of the concept of "range restriction" in correlational research. He notes that IQ and success appear to be fairly well correlated up to an IQ of 120 or so, and that beyond this level there is very little relationship between IQ and success. Only 10% of the population has an IQ above 120, meaning that very few fall into this classification. Past an IQ of 132, less than 2% of the population is found.

It is clear that one cannot correlate a constant with a variable, since the constant does not change no matter what the value of the variable. Narrowing down the IQ scale to only persons above 120 makes the IQ scale close to a constant.

To provide an analogy, consider the correlation between height and basketball ability. Up to a height of about six feet two inches, there is a very high correlation between height and basketball ability. Above that height, however, other factors become more important than height. Agility, good ball-handling skills, eye-hand coordination, etc., all trump height as important facets of a good basketball player among the tallest 10% of the population. A clumsy seven-footer will never be able to compete with a skilled six-foot-two player.

All of this does not prove that height is unimportant in basketball (even among the top 10% of the population in height), but just that by restricting the range of basketball players to those over six-foot-two essentially guarantees that the correlation of height with basketball skill will be low.

Another sloppy statement in the book indicates that the 1918 flu pandemic was followed by "the First World War, then the Depression, then the Second World War," where clearly the First World War preceded the flu pandemic.

Although there is much about the book that is interesting, these two missteps alone reveal a lack of attention to detail that leads one to wonder how valid the rest of the book is. I sincerely hope that Gladwell's next book will be more along the lines of "The Tipping Point" and "Blink."

Gladwell's thesis in this book is, essentially, that success in life is largely the result of one's circumstances and surroundings (i.e., "luck"), not of good old-fashioned pluck, determination, and grit. Initially, his thesis is not even supported by many of the examples he gives, as no doubt the people he writes about had all three of these in spades. Sure, Bill Gates did have a unique opportunity in high school in that he was given rare access to a computer when such was virtually unheard of for a high school student. But I'm sure that in Bill Gates' high school class, there were plenty of other students given the same opportunity who decided they'd rather go to keg parties than become computing phenoms. Yet Gladwell gives that aspect of their achievements short shrift. Why? Because it doesn't fit his thesis. It is obvious that Gladwell started with his thesis and then researched for examples which he could mold around it, instead of starting with a genuine search for the "secret of success."

And not only that, Gladwell draws very broad conclusions about the secrets of success from relatively few examples which he was apparently able to dig up to support his world view. I'm sure that for every successful person whom Gladwell wrote about in the book, there is another successful person who had no discernible benefit of environment or circumstance in achieving success.

Furthermore, some of the examples he gives are supported with nothing but anecdotal evidence. For example, he says that one of the reasons why so many children of Jewish garment workers were able to become successful litigation and hostile takeover lawyers on Wall Street was because when they graduated law school, the staid, established firms wouldn't hire Jews, and they didn't think it "gentlemanly" to do litigation and hostile takeover work. So, the Jewish lawyers, Gladwell tells us, formed their own firms and became experts at the kind of law that the staid firms would not practice. And eventually, so Gladwell says, that kind of law became "in vogue" and then the Jewish lawyers were in very high demand. A very intriguing story, no doubt, but it's not valid to draw such sweeping conclusions based on the experience of one or two people.

Additionally, I'm troubled by the apparent fact that Gladwell defines "success" in life as "becoming rich and famous." Yeah, if you're talking about becoming a household name or the very elite of the elite of a particular area of endeavor, it certainly helps to have a lucky break or two somewhere along the way, and Gladwell's thesis may have more validity when you set the bar of "success" so high. But certainly, it's quite possible to have a fulfilled professional and social life with nothing but sheer determination and hard work, sans "good fortune." The danger of the book is that some readers will interpret the message as, "I'm not one of the lucky few, so why try"?

And finally, don't waste your time on this book if you're looking for any advice on how to succeed. The only "takeaway" I could find from the book is that, essentially, success is largely out of your hands, and there's really nothing you can do about it. Fortunately, I don't believe that, and you shouldn't, either.

I have read all of Gladwell's previous offerings and I must say this is by far his worst thus far. This book is unscientific, unoriginal and badly researched.

Let me start with the non-science. Especially the title. The use of a term like "Outliers" would suggest that Gladwell has understood the meaning of that word in the statistical context. Instead, he bandied the word like any lay person would and classified anyone worth billions such as Rockefeller and Bill Gates as an "outlier" in the human population. Statistical probability does not preclude the existence of someone like Rockefeller or Gates. In fact, it is almost certain that given a sufficiently large population, you will have people like that. The only condition is that the bulk would fall in the middle of the distribution and a great minority should fall in either end. Gates is therefore not an outlier as such, but rather the expected result from chance. To be fair, Gladwell did note that the fortunes of such people have more to do with luck than innate ability. I would have no problem had Gladwell titled his book "Luck". Instead, he attempted to imbibe some false scientific credibility using a scientific term. Even the introductory definition of an outlier is incomplete. In any case, there are precious few scientific concepts in this book.

As for originality, the book comprises mostly of bits and pieces that are well-known in the public domain. I give Gladwell credit for bringing them together in a nice easy-to-read form for the general population. However, none of the things he shared are really new.

Last but not least, there are a lot of suppositions which are not well-backed by proper research or at least not properly stated as suppositions. In particular, I found it laughable that he classified Singapore as a centuries-old "rice paddy" country (neither the centuries-old part nor the rice-paddy part is true). Also, the justification of language as a rationale for mathematical ability is tenuous at best. It is far harder to write the Chinese characters for the numbers than the English versions. As far as I know, all countries use the arabic numeral system nowadays. Also, some of the "math-whiz" countries actually teach mathematics in English (e.g. Singapore).

In conclusion, if you are looking for a book which tells you that while innate smarts have some effect, how far you get ahead depends on your circumstances, your culture, hard work and a good dose of luck, this is the book for you. But I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't know that already.

Outliers is about what makes people successful, and most of the book is effective at pointing out the effect of factors other than each person's individual talent or determination, particularly the family, the social lottery in terms of demographics, ethnicity or season of birth, and the opportunities provided by the economy. The author wisely does not define success, and looks at it in a variety of ways. It can be living long, rising to the top of a sport or an art, or accumulating wealth, but he does not include examples of scientists or politicians. He eloquently denounces crude metrics like IQs as predictors of success, as well as practices by schools or sport federations that choose young children for advanced programs by year of birth, and end up selecting the oldest within that year rather than the most talented.

The first part of the book is on subject and both entertaining and enlightening. Other reviewers have criticized it as anecdotal, unscientific, and poorly researched. The anecdotes, however, told me a few things I hadn't heard before, and, if they have been expressed better in earlier books, that may be but I have not read them and I credit the author for bringing them to my attention.

The second part, entitled "Legacy," on the other hand, is off topic. The ethnic theory of plane crashes, for example, is about the pitfalls of cross-cultural communications in a business where it must happen: Korean crews must talk with American air traffic controllers. Interesting though these challenges may be their connection with outliers and individual success is tenuous at best.

It gets worse in the chapter on rice paddies and math tests. The author alleges that a rice growing culture makes children good not only at math tests but at math itself, and just about everything he says in this chapter is overly general and questionable. First, if growing rice actually made people good at math, how come this body of knowledge was almost entirely developed in the Middle-East and Europe where rice was not a staple?

The author makes much of the conciseness of Chinese number words as an advantage for Asian children, but Japanese number words are not concise: the words one, six, seven and eight have two syllables, and Japanese has not one but two sets of number words in use, a native one and the one borrowed from Chinese. Conceptually, the Chinese way of counting is similar to the Roman system, and not particularly helpful for arithmetic. The key breakthrough in making additions easy was the numerals invented by Arabs.
He describes math in "the West," whatever that label may cover, as being a "rote learning system," but, compared at least to Japan, the teaching of math in the US or Europe involves considerably less rote learning. He also claims that "feudalism simply can't work in a rice economy" (p.236). What about Japan, which had a rice economy in a feudal system for 700 years? And, even though he acknowledges in a footnote that northern China grows wheat rather than rice, everywhere else, he equates Asian with rice growing.
The author also believes that long summer vacations were introduced in the US and Europe to give children rest. Another explanation is that children were given time off school so that they could help with harvests, and that the tradition endured after agriculture stopped being the main economic activity.

At the same time, he omits one obvious explanation for the excellence of students from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore on math tests: they are key to success in the competitive entrance exams for universities. For similar reasons, if students worldwide were given SATs, Americans would probably come out on top.

He concludes the book with the history of his own Jamaican family and how its circumstances shaped him. Is it relevant? Is the author one of the Outliers the book is about? In our own minds, we are all outliers.

I don't know how to rate this popular book. I give it four stars for story telling, and one star for originality.
Following two best-selling books, Malcolm Gladwell again masterfully turns bits of trivia into fascinating tales and keeps you turning the pages. From hockey players to computer nerds to airline pilots, it's a series of detective accounts of unusual people around the world famous and not-so famous. The book is an easy and entertaining reading on lazy and hazy summer days, especially for these with a curious mind, preferably well-versed in American culture.

But borrow it from your local library or buy it used. You won't want to read it again due to its total lack of original insights.
One review on this site has already pointed out that 80 percent of the content is known on the net and the rest of the material really just comes from one nice book, Annette Lareau's "Unequal Childhoods." Enough said. I will focus on new insight: does the book have any?

First, the book can be summed up as: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." This is probably the most famous line uttered by Thomas Edison, arguably the most successful and best-known inventor of all time, with more than a thousand patents to his name. I cannot imagine Gladwell is unaware of this statement. But neither this line nor Edison the extraordinary outlier was in the book. Edison's only mention is on page 37: "He (Bill Gates) is sometimes called the Edison of the Internet." Throughout the book, Gladwell writes as if he has stumbled on something profound and new. It is not. Neither is "talent alone is enough" as deep-rooted a belief in America as Gladwell claims. I recently wrote to a Wall Street Journal writer who penned How Calvin Learned His Ride. [...] To my surprise, Matthew Futterman is totally unaware of this book, yet in that short article he laid out exactly the same logic of success for American racehorse riders: early start and years of endless practice. According to Futterman, that's only possible at the bush tracks in the Cajun country, and that's exactly where most of the star riders came from. Calvin Borel, who almost became the first jockey to win the Triple Crown with different horses, was first put on horseback at age 2, "by the time he began race-riding legally at 16, he already had thousands of races under his belt. After years of riding with a stopwatch he had developed an internal clock in his head and could sense the difference between an eighth-of-a-mile that took 12 seconds and one that took 13."

Second, the insight that one needs a fortunate set of circumstances to be successful is best captured by a pair of opposite Chinese maxims: Tian Shi, Di Li, Ren He (timing, place, social environment are all right for success), Shen Bu Feng Shi (not born at the right time). There is a large social inequality literature with deeper insight in a Western context that the book ignores.

Third, the idea that IQ is but one measure of personal ability is not new: the theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983. [...] The idea that success depends on a raw intrinsic intellect has been largely discredited. In the classical experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in 1970, we have learned that the innate ability to control impulsive behavior, what Mischel called "delayed gratification," is the single most important factor in determining a child's future success.

Fourth, the idea that once discovered/developed (e.g., the code for computer operating system), no more chance for future generations is best expressed in John Horgan's 1996 book, The End of Science. The importance of jumping into a new field at the right time is better articulated in the 2005 book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.

In places where Gladwell seems to be striking out, he is mistaken. For example, he attributes Chinese cultural success at math to rice paddy cultivation. But wait, Chinese civilization was developed in the wheat-growing north whereas the southern rice cultivating regions were long considered backward barbarian lands. My mother, who was born in Burma by Chinese immigrant parents, often tells me stories about how lazy southeast Asian rice farmers were: they would plant rice and stayed home until it's time for harvest. Conditions vary, but I am very skeptical that the requirement for constant back-breaking labor necessarily leads to certain work ethic. His air pilot story is challenged by other reviewers who know the industry.

The conventional wisdom Gladwell challenges is not universal, but perhaps modern America alone. In fact, the opposite is true for the Asian educational tradition and culture. There, and under the guidance of Asian mom in America, young students spend way too much time on structured learning and exam drills. One may wonder if Chris Langan is the unfortunate by-product of an extremely free-flowing and dynamic culture. Do you want to waste a few potential outliers or suppress a whole generation?

While a wake-up call to overly permissible American educators is necessary, the book's suggestion that the government ought to reduce outliers' reward because they should be more grateful for their social circumstances could only lead to a less motivated and dynamic society.

Mcbooks like this and The World Is Flat are what sell well. They are entertaining and educational, but unlikely to have lasting power. As Xu Zhuyuan pointed out, Fast Company will probably regret calling Mr. Gladwell "the Drucker of the 21st century." [...] Years from now, people would be still reading Peter Drucker, but not Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman.