Outliers by Malcolm Galdwell

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the most famous and successful journalists in the United States, long unpublished in the magazine New Yorker (the bulwark of American intellectuals). He has written 3 books already (not counting the recently published collection of articles from New Yorker), all of them became bestsellers, and gone millions. The first book is Tipping point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, in which Gladwell explains the effect of social epidemics - like any new idea captures the modern world with astonishing speed. The second book is Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, which is about the ability of people in the moment to make good decisions.

Finally, the last book - Outliers: The Story of Success - is a book about the so-called "statistical outliers", people who have achieved far more than the average person, and the reasons for these achievements. Gladwell on several examples shows how success is 100% achievement of a person, but is not a simple coincidence. As the first example of success, at first glance, paranormal, he cites the fact that over 50% of the professional Canadian ice hockey players were born from January to March.

The sociologist who has studied this phenomenon realized that this is because of the time when children join a hockey team. According to the terms set in the Canadian group, a child should be no more than 9 years on January 1. This means that a child born January 2 is actually a year older than a child whose birthday is in December, giving him a huge advantage early on. Accordingly, this child will be "on average" to show the best results, it will be more to train, to produce on the ice, and so on. From one kind of inconsequential details depends on the success of life...

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...s in the University of Washington, which worked 24 hours a day, but in the range from three nights to six in the morning they had not been held, and the 16-year-old boy left home at night and went to the university on foot to steal the university a few hours of computer time. So he spent five years with the eighth grade through high school graduation. This period was also comparable to the time of 10 000 hours a magic number of great skill.

This chapter shows that it is not talent which makes genius, but hard work and numerous hours devoted to the certain occupation in order to reach success. The quantity of hours – 10,000 – is a very big number, but, as an old proverb says, practice makes perfect and ten thousand hours are quite enough to make a perfect professional.

Works Cited

Galdwell, M. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Penguin Books, 2009. Print.