Outliers | The Story of Success | Malcom Gladwell's book review

Many a time we regard our erstwhile classmate in twelfth grade who got into IIT as "gifted" or a "genius".Our parents heard from teachers who called this classmate( I am sure he was not a dear friend) a "child prodigy".It was not unusual for the "prodigy" to get into India's top engineering schools.We subliminally began to believe in ourself as a "mediocre".Our parents played an important role in the formation of this opinion.They compared our performance with the genius in the class one test after another.Naturally, we were slowly pushed into the bracket of averageness. For many of us this has been the situation hitherto. Perhaps it is time after many years to ask some questions. Can a student avoid this vicious cycle of stereotypes ? Should we fall prey to the victimhood ? Is this all about our innate ability ? Should any student be written off as a failure ?

As a high school student we brought the story that our capacity was circumscribed by our "IQ".We thought all great people in the world had substantially higher IQ's to steer them towards success of which we only dreamed.Are we really destined to be the part of the proletarian lot to work in a mundane profession of drudgery without scaling the heights of science or arts or any other realm ? What differentiates an "Outlier" from the pack? To use the word "pack" may seem a terrible expression , but the "pack" is the pack due to a reason and an Outlier is an Outlier for many a reason.

Malcom Gladwell's 'Outliers' is the book that brilliantly argues the case of Outliers and explores the niche of an Outlier that made him excel beyond the ordinary.It looks at the opportunity that was available to the Outlier and discerns that the success of an Outlier is grounded in very favorable circumstances that enabled the person to seize the moment and rise to the occasion.

As an example, Bill Gates got a chance to work on Mainframes which was pretty expensive in his days and out of reach for a normal teenager. This happened just because his school had connections that helped him get "Mainframe time" and later Gates could make a deal with a firm ( that happened to be near his house) to get "desk time" on the Mainframe in exchange for being a "tester".Yes, even Bill Joy had favorable circumstances as he got more time in his college's mainframe computer by discovering a bug in the billing time that allowed him to use the system long enough to master programming without being drained in pocket , a chance inconceivable at the time. Bill Joy seized the opportunity and wrote the newer version of the UNIX operating system still in use today.He also rewrote Java!!.

The pertinence of effort in extraordinary achievement is underscored by perseverance of the Outlier.Gladwell debunks the idea of very high IQ solely playing a role in this phenomenon and explains that a "threshold" of IQ might be necessary to win a nobel prize but once a peron's IQ is above the threshold, it does not matter how high the IQ is, but how far the person's persistence is and how much a better his circumstances are.

The book explores the inextricable link of our culture and its legacy that shapes our personality and our habits for the world .The book presents the example of a family of peasants in China who work round the clock for a better harvest and this quality of hardwork is passed on to the children who invariably grow up to be successful lawyers or bankers when they come to the United States by outperforming their american counterparts in Math.The Chinese nomenclature of numbering also chips in to give its children an added advantage.

Summarily, the book is an engaging read that makes us slowly realize that an Outlier is in fact not an Outlier at all. It prepares us for this conclusion all along the chapters making its case stronger by every page.By the end of the book , a reader would probably be emancipated form the belief he would have held tenaciously on "geniuses" since tenth or twelfth grade. The reader would not be overboard to hope and believe that he too can be the Outlier, provided he looked for the right turns and worked hard as ever to win.