Malcolm Gladwell's ability to take the somewhat obscure patterns of everyday life and bring concentration to them in easy to understand language is his true strength as a writer and certainly as a researcher.
The book Tipping Point (Time Warner Book Group, 2000, 2002), Gladwell explains how ideas, trends or social activities come to be phenomena's with just an unseen force that he called the tipping point. In Blink (Time Warner Book Group, 2005), he explores how and why decisions are made in the blink of an eye.
Book
With his new book, Outliers The Story of Success (Little Brown and Company, 2008), Gladwell has advanced a ideas for why some habitancy are more thriving than others. In his research, he found patterns of house history, birthdates, birthplace, and culture lead to a person's success.
While in his first two books he took relatively uncomplicated concepts and gave them shape, form and force, in Outliers, the book starts out very strong but in the end not all of the research seems to keep his theories.
Social Class Makes a disagreement in Success
The name of the book is defined in the very first paragraph. Gladwell wrote that an outlier is,"1: something that is situated away from or classified differently from a main or associated body 2: a statistical observation that is markedly separate in value from others in the sample".
He uses the remainder of the book to information how patterns can be found when comparing individuals in sure groups. Some of the patterns included:
Most thriving hockey players are born in the month of January.
After researching athletes, musicians and others, research shows it takes 10,000 hours of convention to come to be an expert.
Successful technology giants like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Paul Allen, were born in the middle of the years of 1953 and 1955.
The "honor culture" experienced throughout the southern states, especially in the Appalachians, was born out of the 'Scotch-Irish' decedents who settled in those areas.
Children who were raised in upper and upper middle classes were more thriving in their adult lives than those raised in lower and lower middle class families because of a sense of entitlement.
The Chinese culture can understand math faster and better than other cultures because of working long hours 360 days a year with rice paddies. And, Chinese children learn to count earlier in life because Chinese whole words are shorter and easier to repeat than English whole words.
A Pattern of Success for Gladwell
While the factory of this book is not as substantiated by the research (I'm still not sure how rice paddies tell to being better at math) as Gladwell's previous books, some of the research such as the 10,000 to specialist a skill makes excellent sense.
Gladwell's storytelling is what makes Outliers worth the read.
Outliers Book present - Stories of Success
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น