I recently picked up Outliers on a whim while I was waiting around at Chicago O’Hare during a long delay. I finished the book in the 6 hours I was flying and I was left a bit “empty” feeling when I was done reading. The book attempts to explain the perception of “genius” or “excellence” and show that society’s opinion and social circumstance turn minor advantages into major advantages to individuals over time.
Great. I agree. But most of the “evidence” here is anecdotal, and while it makes for interesting stories, it is not really anything new - it is simply all summarized in a nice, hardcover book. I am not the only one underwhelmed by Gladwell’s book, Joel Spolsky provides a nice summary as well.
Rather than rehash my issues with Outliers, I will simply give my only anecdotal evidence that Gladwell doesn’t really offer anything new in this book.
My Anecdotal Evidence that Malcolm Gladwell is Lame
When I went to lunch with some of my co-workers a few months ago we were discussing successful people and of course Bill Gates came up. He is worth nearly $60,000,000,000 and in a world that views wealth as success, his name was bound to make it into the conversation. What was our conclusion on Bill Gates’ success?
He was in the right place at the right time. Sure, he’s brilliant. He’s a visionary. He can be credited with changing the world of computers. But he was in the right place at the right time when he founded Microsoft and an incredible number of chance events occurred, all in his favor, that lead to his success. Of course he had to be smart and be relatively risk averse to pursue the opportunities that came up. But other smart people were around who probably wouldn’t have been too far behind him had he not acted when he did.
And that is essentially what Malcolm Gladwell tries to establish. But my point is it didn’t need to be established. Didn’t we already know this?
See - Malcolm Gladwell’s book didn’t teach anyone anything new. And I love “evidence” based on a few stories (or one, in this case).
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Gladwell himself is living out the premise of his latest book, albeit on a smaller scale. He’s been fairly successful up to this point at dressing up the obvious and passing it off as insight. Maybe an alternate title for Outliers could have been “It’s better to be lucky than good, and I’m living proof!”
Even as mass-market publications go, it’s probably fair to expect a little deeper level of insight or as you suggest better evidence than what Outliers appears to offer.
Just finished (half of) Tipping Point and was similarly disappointed. It’s just a bunch of long-winded essays that really say nothing more than “sometimes stuff blows up fast” and “some people are more social than others.” Great. Thanks for that. Far too erudite for its own good and had to put ‘er down.
As a reader of his latest book, I am an outlier with regard to the author relying on anecdotal evidence: I am a rare reader who knows the following facts because I worked at the Mudge Rose law firm for over 20 years. In his Joe Flom chapter, Gladwell’s facts about the firm are wrong. There was no Mudge Rose in the late 1940s, when he has Flom interviewing there and Mr. Rose’s picture hanging on the wall. Milton Rose would have been in his forties then, and was with the Baldwin Todd firm. Mudge Stern (sounds Jewish, ruining Gladwell’s point) and Baldwin Todd merged in the early 1950s, creating Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander - that became Nixon Mudge ten years later, and went out of existence in 1993.