Outliers Analysis
OUTLIERS
The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
As I read Outliers, an excellent book by Malcom Gladwell also author of the Tipping Point one of my favorite marketing books I couldn’t help being reminded of the movie Good Will Hunting. There is a particular scene in the movie where Matt Damon, playing a poor teen from Southern Boston confronts a wealthy MIT student. Damon tells him, “You were born on third base and you think you hit a triple.” In other words, we often over-attribute our successes to our natural talents. But really, those talents and abilities came about through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should recognize, learn to use wisely and be grateful for.
In the book Galdwell questions success and natural inborn talent. He is not denying that talent is without a doubt essential for success but more then that he believes in practice, culture, upbringing and other external factors that affect you and become either advantages or, unfortunately, disadvantages. These factors are the ones that will make you stand out or blend in. Someone with superior talent could be born at the wrong time or place and miss achieving prominence. The book makes you skeptical about successful peoples background and their personalities. It makes you analyze different case scenarios that influence their outcome. Events like the Depression, WWII, among many others, shape the opportunities that even a genius might have or miss and this limits his/her probable success. It makes you think of a year, a 4 digit number that establishes your birth date and when you enter the world, in a completely different way. Its amazing how the year that your born in makes such a difference in the way that your life is going to be and how well you do in the world, Hence, success is a result of an accumulation of advantages.
Another important factor are your interpersonal skills, like how well you communicate. Like in the case of the airplane crash, apart from the
The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
As I read Outliers, an excellent book by Malcom Gladwell also author of the Tipping Point one of my favorite marketing books I couldn’t help being reminded of the movie Good Will Hunting. There is a particular scene in the movie where Matt Damon, playing a poor teen from Southern Boston confronts a wealthy MIT student. Damon tells him, “You were born on third base and you think you hit a triple.” In other words, we often over-attribute our successes to our natural talents. But really, those talents and abilities came about through a series of explainable, fortunate circumstances that we should recognize, learn to use wisely and be grateful for.
In the book Galdwell questions success and natural inborn talent. He is not denying that talent is without a doubt essential for success but more then that he believes in practice, culture, upbringing and other external factors that affect you and become either advantages or, unfortunately, disadvantages. These factors are the ones that will make you stand out or blend in. Someone with superior talent could be born at the wrong time or place and miss achieving prominence. The book makes you skeptical about successful peoples background and their personalities. It makes you analyze different case scenarios that influence their outcome. Events like the Depression, WWII, among many others, shape the opportunities that even a genius might have or miss and this limits his/her probable success. It makes you think of a year, a 4 digit number that establishes your birth date and when you enter the world, in a completely different way. Its amazing how the year that your born in makes such a difference in the way that your life is going to be and how well you do in the world, Hence, success is a result of an accumulation of advantages.
Another important factor are your interpersonal skills, like how well you communicate. Like in the case of the airplane crash, apart from the