Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book - “Outliers: Why Some Succeed and Some Don’t”
June 27th, 2008 by admin
The New York Times has an article about author Malcolm Gladwell’s new book. The title is “Outliers: Why Some Succeed and Some Don’t.” Here’s the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/technology/28online.html
The 800 CEO Read blog provides some more information based on a summary from the publisher’s catalog:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
And an excerpt from the book:
OUTLIERS is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In OUTLIERS, we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world’s greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us–the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual–I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.
The book doesn’t come out until November and it already has a Amazon.com sales rank hovering around 2000 (and it was like this when I first checked the book’s Amazon page a couple weeks ago, so it’s not just a bounce from the New York Times article). I thought Gladwell’s previous books Blink and The Tipping Point were ok, but I already knew about most of the psychological studies he referenced in the books. I’m really excited about his new book. I’m guessing he will probably interview Anders Ericsson, one of the top researchers regarding expertise and deliberate practice. Overall, the book sounds exciting and I can’t wait to get it.
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