Krishna
We have reviewed The Tipping Point by the same author earlier and liked it. A lot. This book opens with a similar astonishing detail and tells us why Malcolm Gladwell is an author who is more or less universally liked! In the other book, he starts with the strange experience of Hush Puppies. In this one, he talks about an isolated town called Roseto in USA which exhibited a weird health patten (on the good side) and explains why it is so. Fascinating start to the book.
The concept of Outliers is not new to anyone who knows even rudimentary statistics but the way Malcolm goes about explaining it is just outright fascinating. I have never come across anything like the angle with which he approaches the subject.
The amazing revelations for which Gladwell is known continue. First he proves that to excel at anything you need to put in ten thousand hours. He proves it by example after example, that of Bill Gates, Beatles and other greats, on how they got opportunities that no one else got.
Also he contrasts J Oppenheimer with an equally intelligent Charlie Lagan and how their family backgrounds – not the wealth part but how families groomed children – that made all the difference between the wildly differing material success of each person. Astonishing.
Hel also talks of the success of the Jewish refugees from poverty to wealth in terms of the timing and, actually, the fact that they were destitute.
He then moves on to the honour culture prevailing in South Eastern United stated in the olden times and why the cycle of killings and revenge killings emerged in multiple places at once. Again he lifts you up from individual instances to the panoramic view of the nature of the settlers – where they came from, what they did etc – that it suddenly starts to make some sense.
He also reasons that some of the plane crashes happened because the subordinates of a tired captain did not speak up and that is inbred due to the culture of their home lands.
The book goes into less surprising (but still interesting?) facts about how achievement comes from the country’s culture. (Why are Chinese good at math? Because their culture involves planting rice and managing a harvest. Puzzled? A long explanation exists. Read the book to understand.
When cultural biases exert great influence many years and many generations later even when the people are in totally different environments, they can be overcome if some of the traits create a negative effect, according to the author.
It is interesting to read and what I am beginning to see is that Malcolm Gladwell is a ‘one idea’ author. In tipping point, it was all about how suddenly something comes into fashion and in this one (including the personal family history in the epilog) it is all about how exceptional performance is not due to exceptional ability alone but due to the opportunities that came in the way of these overachievers, based on the special circumstances of the year (even the month) of the month and how the business or cultural climate came to value them above all just when they were ready and “trained”.
Worth reading but in my opinion, the hype on this was a setback to me. I probably expected too much, which is probably not the author’s fault.
Sigh…
6/10
— Krishna