Success

One Sunday morning on the CBS early show, my husband and I watched an interview with Malcolm Gladwell. He is the one who coined the term tipping point and his book by that title and well as “Blink” were both best sellers.
His new book is “Outliers: the Story of Success.” It is built around the premise of wondering why some people succeed more than others. Gladwell argues that true success is more than intelligence and ambition and if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them—at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. The story of success is more complex—and a lot more interesting--than it initially appears.
“Outliers” explains what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the extraordinary success of Asians at math, the hidden advantages of star athletes, and the reason you’ve never heard of the world’s smartest man—all in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. It matters what year you were born if you want to be a Silicon Valley billionaire, Gladwell, argues and it matters where you were born if you want to be a successful pilot. The lives of outliers—those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience—follow a peculiar unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.