Book Review Of Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Introduction

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian journalist and author who studies sociology, psychology, and social psychology, explains the concepts, reasons, and factors of why some people are successful among others and what he calls outliers in society. Gladwell collects different stories as evidence to reflect his concepts that success is due to several factors such as opportunity, the amount of time or practice dedicated to the subject, the environment in which you grew, taking the opportunity at the right time and your family background, and the type of culture one has. The reason why this book was chosen to review was because it had great reviews and is currently top 10 in the national best sellers; also that

Gladwell mentions about the 10,000 hour rule as a point in time where mastery is achieved through practice and study. In most of the cases is about how early the practice was started. The examples that the author uses are the background histories of Bill Joy, who wrote of UNIX and Java, Bill Gates, who founded Microsoft, Mozart, and the band The Beatles. In the example of Bill Joy, he was the best in school and brilliant in mathematics, but when he came across computers, he became very interested and since then a life task to follow. He became successful due to how early he started programming, his ability, and the opportunity of working in computers at that time, which later became a universal revolution. Gladwell mentions: “It as a story of how the outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage” (Gladwell, 2008). On the story of Bill Gates, Gladwell points how much programming background and the opportunities he faced before dropping college at his sophomore year and later becoming one of the most successful men in the world by developing personal computers. Bill Gates was born in 1955. He came from a wealthy family. He was going to Lakeside school, where they happened to have a

The author uses the example of how people from different cultures react differently to insults and this to affect the importance of communication that can be seen in the business world. Moreover, the author uses cases of plane crashes such as why the Korean Airlines were having a lot of crashes and the reason of the accident of the Colombian plane from Avianca Airlines. In the case of the Korean Airlines, the main reason was due to their mitigated language where different phrases could have other meaning and one who is was in a lower rank, tended to use a different language to those form a higher rank. Therefore, language and culture are important when the communication needs to be straight and there is not sufficient time to imply the meaning of phrases. The same idea is presented in the Avianca Airline case, where due to