Technology+Leadership+Book+Summary

Gladwell, Malcolm, (2008). //Outliers//, The Story of Success,New York, Little, Brown and Company.

Malcolm Gladwell explores success in life by looking at a person’s birth date, their family, the amount of time contributed to learning, and the lives of successful individuals.

Gladwell begins by looking at birth dates and notices there apprears to be a coorelation between success and the successsful Canadian hockey league players. The most successful hockey players and athletes for the most part, have birthdates in January and February. With a birth date during these months, they have gained about 6 months of time on their peers due to the cutoff date for qualifying for different age brackets. Athletes born during these months will have and advantage over those borne in the late summer or fall just before the cut off date.

We have always heard the phrase, “they were just born in the right family”, and Gladwell (2008) agrees with this statement to some degree. While examining the lives of individuals, you can tell the influence of family and location. This does not mean an individual can not be successful, but it sure doesn’t hurt to a part of a family with strong work ethics and educational values. Gladwell (2008) also compared similar individuals in different communities and the assumptions were that even communities influenced an individual’s rate of success.

How much time does it require for someone to invest before they are successful at what they do? In __Outliers__, Gladwell (2008) examines what he calls the “10,000 hour rule”. If we scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do we always find the equivalent of theMichiganComputerCenteror the hockey all-star team – some sort of special opportunity for practice?” (Gladwell, 2008, p.47) After examining the lives of the Beatles, Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and others, Gladwell (2008) discovered that despite having disparate skill sets, these highly successful people had a common characteristic: each of them spent well over 10,000 hours learning, practicing, and perfecting their skills. Gladwell states, “Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” Each of them spent well over 10,000 hours learning, practicing, and perfecting their skills night and day. One might ask, Is the ten-thousand-hour rule a general rule of success?

Gladwell (2008) looks further into the lives of several software giants and discovers their birth years were within a five year range. He brings up a lot of facts that makes one want to make assumptions like the year you were born and the month you were born play a large part on your success. Another look into the lives of individuals leads us to examine their IQ scores. IQ scores and success only work up until a point, but where to the majority of people who have high IQ’s go to school? The Ivy League schools. Also, Nobel Prize winners in Medicine have the college where they received their undergraduate degrees. One might think those professors are more intelligent and stronger teachers, but it might be the instruction and freedom to delve deeply into their interest during those college years that contributed to their success.

Gladwell (2008) also looks into the math success of children born in Asian coutries and discovers a contributing factor in math success has to be their language itself. While the English mathematical vocabulary does not lend itself to fluency, the Asian languages intonations excel the children’s ability to become fluent in the mathematical terms several years ahead of American children. The children born of Asian decent and live in Asian countries are exposed to hard work where as American children lead toward finding mechanical solutions to eliminate hard work. It appears these Asian children will spend the time working to solve mathematical problems while American children are not willing to spend the time, thus falling short of their 10,000 hours.

Malcolm Gladwell (2008) concludes his book by looking at the KIPP academy to discover various differences to the traditional American school system. Total hours spent in class instruction and the lengths of the classes are longer. Students receive at music twice a week and everyone is enrolled in orchestra. Their days are from seven twenty-five untilseven p.m. Their succes is contributed to hard work, more time in the classroom, extended hours, etc...

Gladwell (2008) draws the conclusion that we are all products of our families, environments, and culture. Can this be changed?