My Review of Outliers book

Front cover of the Book: Available at Target, eBay, GooglePlay, Audible, Barnes and Nobles, etc.

A Statistics book that I really enjoyed over the summer was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I loved how this book was written to dispel conventional notions. Usually, we are taught that if you work hard enough, you can achieve anything. Supposedly this is the American dream. But how accurate is this actually? Outliers shows associations between lurking variables, historical contexts, and opportunities available with the successfulness of our most well-known successful people. This has shown me the reality of the American dream and ALL the circumstances that allowed Fortune 500 people to reach where they are today.

One of my favorite stories was about Bill Gates. We all think that he was just a super successful person because he worked hard. While that is true, it is not exactly the whole story. For starters, you have to consider that he was born in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Seattle, Washington in an upper-middle class family. He attended one of the most prestigious college preparatory institutions for middle and high school in the 1960s to 1970s that was able to access the newest computer technology--the ASR--at his time. Most colleges didn’t even have such technology! Gates and his friends would spend hours in the computer room utilizing this technology. When an opportunity to go to the Computer Center at the University of Washington came to his school through his friend’s mom (a founder of the firm), Gates took the opportunity to go and got many hours of practicing coding. Gates had an extraordinary upbringing, especially in the time he was born. Gladwell completes this section on page 65 with historical context of January 1975 being the dawn of the computer age. If you were a few years out of college at the time, you would have missed this age because of the expense of the personal computer. If you were still in high school, it would have also been difficult. “The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955. There is an easy way to test this theory. When was Bill Gates born? Bill Gates: October 28, 1955.”

This book showed me interesting points in the story that most people overlook, do not take into account, do not research, and/or forget about. We do not come from nothing. Bill Gates certainly did not. These successful people are “invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement….” When we look at people’s cultural and family background, community environment, and other circumstances, we complete the picture of what made them successful besides what their personalities are.

Check out my Pinterest site https://www.pinterest.com/pin/694328467530471764/ where I have posted more information on the book!