Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Book Review: Outliers
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Summary
In 2008, Outliers: The Story of Success written by Malcolm Gladwell, focuses on analyzing the ability of a person to affect significant change in society. The book sets out to explain the societal and cultural forces that give rise to highly opportunistic people. Gladwell (2008) highlights numerous series of anecdotes and emphasizes that every person has easily bought into the myth that all successful individuals are self-made.
Gladwell mentions that every successful person is ultimately one who has thrived due to exceptional opportunities and advantages combined with cultural legacies that have empowered them to strive diligently and perceive their environment in a manner that ordinary people are not capable. In the book, outliers are highly intuitive people that do not fall within the typical comprehensions of success as depicted by society. Great people are those that have reaped from aspects of collaboration, culture, and time (Gladwell, 2008).
In the first section of the book, Gladwell examines the element of opportunity as a core tenet of timing. He provides an anecdote whereby computer moguls such as Bill Gates who was an opportunistic person and successfully developed his company, Microsoft into a technology giant by 1980s. Outlier further analyzes on self-determinism and also the origins of the societal myths that geniuses are not born but made. Gladwell (2008) provides examples such as Classical music icon Mozart, who was not born a prodigy, but by working on his craft for ten thousand hours, he became successful.
In the second section of Outliers, Gladwell seeks out to explain cultural legacies. He asserts that cultural legacies endure after every generation while virtually intact and, are influential in determining the behaviors that we cannot make sense of our world without them. In this section, the author examines both failure and success. Outliers illustrates the influence of a cultur...