Book Review: Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (Non- Fiction)

Outlier (n): A deviation from mean. This is the definition from managerial statistics class but in the book the population is the human population and these outliers are outperformers, “geniuses”, and successful people. This book looks at the factors that contribute to high levels of success. The author claims that the successful people or the so called geniuses are just normal people with talent but there are various factors that contribute to their successes. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. For this 10,000 hour rule he gives examples of the Beatles, Beethoven, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and many other personalities and trust me this does make sense. I along with a friend even proved this theory on the cafeteria table by examining Sachin Tendulkar. He started seriously practicing for 12 hours daily at the age of 12 and at the age of 15 he made the legendary 664 runs partnership with Kambli. So calculating for 3 years and 12 hours daily we get a figure of 10,000+ hours. So he achieved great success only after giving in 10,000+ hours in practice. In short, this book could be termed as a book about how to achieve success as it can explain almost every success story by its theories.