Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell, 2008
Psychology Economics & businessSelf-developmentContemporary fiction
Why the successful are rarely self-made: birthdays, ten-thousand-hour apprenticeships and one lucky terminal, arguing that opportunity is handed out far less evenly than we admit.
Feels like curiosity, hope and unease. About ambition, society and power.
A page from the book
Being brilliant is not the same as being in the right room.
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? Malcolm Gladwell.Gladwell spent nearly a decade as a reporter at The Washington Post before joining The New Yorker in 1996; his 2000 book The Tipping Point made him famous.
Books that feel like this
More by Malcolm Gladwell
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell, 2019
Gladwell argues that our instinct to trust strangers is both society's foundation and its blind spot, and that we misread people we don't know.
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell, 2000
Why do some ideas, products and habits explode while better ones vanish? Gladwell hunts for the small, surprising levers that make change contagious.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Outliers like?
- Feels like curiosity, hope and unease. About ambition, society and power.
- What should I read after Outliers?
- If you liked Outliers, try Good to Great (Jim Collins), Atomic Habits (James Clear) and Start with Why (Simon Sinek).
A taste of the feed
What if the destination matters less than who is sitting beside you?
For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
Good to Great · Jim Collins
A few degrees at takeoff, a different city entirely.
The impact created by a change in your habits is similar to the effect of shifting the route of an airplane by just a few degrees. Imagine you are flying from Los Angeles to New York City. If a pilot leaving from LAX adjusts the heading just 3.5 degrees south, you will land in Washington, D.C., instead of New York. Such a small change is barely noticeable at takeoff—the nose of the airplane moves just a few feet—but when magnified across the entire United States, you end up hundreds of miles apart.
Atomic Habits · James Clear
Motivation cannot be installed after hiring; it has to walk in.
Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire already motivated people and inspire them. People are either motivated or they are not. Unless you give motivated people something to believe in, something bigger than their job to work toward, they will motivate themselves to find a new job and you’ll be stuck with whoever’s left.
Start with Why · Simon Sinek
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