In one of the book's chapters, in which Gladwell focuses on the American public school system, he used research conducted by university sociologist Karl Alexander that suggested that "the way in which education is discussed in the United States is backward". įor Outliers, Gladwell spent time looking for research that made claims that were contrary to what he considered to be popularly held beliefs. Convinced that the most unusual stories had the best chance of reaching the front page of a newspaper, he was "quickly weaned off the notion that should be interested in the mundane". Gladwell was drawn to writing about singular things after he discovered that "they always made the best stories". All Gladwell's books focus on singularities: singular events in The Tipping Point, singular moments in Blink, and singular people in Outliers. Blink explains "what happens during the first two seconds we encounter something, before we actually start to think". The Tipping Point focuses on how ideas and behaviors reach critical mass, such as how Hush Puppies rapidly grew popular in the 1990s.
Both books have been described as "pop economics". īefore Outliers, Gladwell wrote two best-selling books: The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005). His familiarity with academic material has allowed him to write about "psychology experiments, sociological studies, law articles, statistical surveys of plane crashes and classical musicians and hockey players", which he converts into prose accessible to a general audience and which sometimes pass as memes into the popular imagination. The subjects for his articles, usually non-fiction, range from " Dave Gaspayad's infomercial empire to computers that analyze pop songs".
Gladwell was a journalist for The Washington Post before writing for The New Yorker. The writing style, though deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex social phenomena. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by Outliers, finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Generally well received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. The book debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study have disputed Gladwell's usage. Robert Oppenheimer-end up with such vastly different fortunes, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, and how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how two people with exceptional intelligence- Christopher Langan and J. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. Outliers: The Story of Success is the non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008.
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