Tuesday's Pick: Outliers

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has written another brilliantly entertaining book, Outliers: the Story of Success which follows on the heels of his last two best sellers, The Tipping Point and Blink.

An outlier is a superachiever whose success lies outside normal experience. Gladwell draws some very interesting conclusions while researching the reason why some people who are very smart and very ambitious will never be able to equal the phenomenal success of Bill Gates or Robert Oppenheimer or for that matter the musical careers of the Beatles. When outliers become successful it is not solely due to their own efforts but factors beyond their control such as when they were born, their culture, community, and family. It even appears that one nine-year stretch turns out to have produced more outliers than any other period in history. Genius is not even the most important thing when determining a person's potential for success as illustrated by one of the men Gladwell met in his research whose IQ at 200 was even beyond that of Einstein's but who ends up working on a horse farm in the rural wilderness. Gladwell was so fascinated by these anomalies that when he dug deeper to explain the reasons why, his riveting work explodes some common myths and misconceptions about the very nature of success.