Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

First the good – Malcolm Gladwell is a kickass storyteller.

And now to the bad – he can, in all possibility, only tell stories without any substance. His new work Outliers suffers from the same problems that made Blink! a magnet for parodies (I personally love Blank?) and The Tipping Point seem like a ripoff (read Micromotives and Macrobehavior by Thomas Schelling instead). The basic argument he makes in Outliers can be effectively communicated in an essay of few pages and even that won’t be original.

In Outliers, Gladwell tries to break down the cult of genius; that people like Einstien, Mozart, Picasso just appear and succeed irrespective of their background and culture. He posits that chance – by the way of opportunities recieved, family background and cultural legacy – plays a much greater role in the success of these geniuses than one tends to imagine. I agree that, immediately off the head, this is not the way a lot of people think about these outliers. But once phrased, the statement does not require too much explanation: and definitely not a book with an explanation.

Common sense tells us that the opportunities a person gets in life are contingent on the social and financial standing of his parents. Further, even the most brilliant guy then has to put in a lot of effort in turning opportunity into something tangible. And to make it really great, the external world should be ready and primed for this opportunity. And lastly, if you are out to change status quo you will be better off coming from confrontionist culture rather than a passive one. In short, if Bill Gates parents weren’t rich, or he did not spend enough time programming in school, or the world was not ready for computers, or he did have a problem with confrontations, he would not be the richest man in the world.

Does this hypothesis surprise you? If it does, definitely read Outliers. If it does not but you have bought it, take it on your next long journey as a book thats reasonably interesting without being taxing. And finally if you haven’t bought it and are thinking about buying it, think again!