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George Gladwell's Outliers

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Outliers is at once Gladwell’s least and most ambitious book. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, which took their counter intuitiveness to extremes, the conventional wisdom Gladwell seeks to demolish in Outliers isn’t even really CW anymore. Is there anyone who still believes that “success is exclusively a matter of individual merit,” which is how Gladwell describes his straw man? And yet, as Gladwell examines all the things other than individual merit—the “hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies”—that produce hockey stars and software billionaires and math geniuses, he builds a brief for a massive reorganization of social structures and institutions that will give people who don’t have those advantages and opportunities and legacies an equal shot at success.

Consider, for instance, those hockey stars. Relying on the work of a Canadian psychologist who noticed that a disproportionate number of elite hockey players in his country were born in the first half of the year, Gladwell explains what academics call the relative-age effect, by which an initial …show more content…
It’s a book that celebrates the great man, then, as politely as possible, cuts him down to size. “I’m one of those people who started watching golf, even though I’ve never picked up a golf ball in my life, when Tiger Woods started winning, because he’s just so extraordinarily compelling,” Gladwell says. “There is something inherently interesting about exploring a topic through the lens of these people, these outlier types, who are off the charts. The book’s saying, ‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of opportunities they’ve been given.’ So I feel like, yeah, we know that, but we don’t act on it, so that’s why I think it’s worth repeating, because it’s one of those little truths that kind of dribbles away when it comes time for

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