Review of Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2008 US $27.99, 320 pp ISBN 978 0 31601 792 3 First published in Policy Magazine , June 2009. High intelligence and extraordinary achievement are endlessly fascinating subjects. We’d all like to know the secret behind stratospherically successful individuals so we can emulate their accomplishments. Outliers sets out to explain the secret of success—but it is far from successful in doing so. To solve the puzzle of high achievement, Gladwell takes a number of examples of exceptional people and seeks to explain why these people reached great heights in their chosen professions. But rather than examining the personality types of these exceptional individuals, he looks at the environment in which they grew up. Gladwell’s thesis is that demographic, social, and even ancestral factors have greater explaining power than individual personality traits when trying to account for success. Gladwell’s book is wri