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A review by richardbakare
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
5.0
The debate of Nature versus Nurture is an old one. Hero culture, that idea of individual exceptionalism willed from “boot strap” beginnings, prevails heavily in the US. What this vision lacks is the detailed history and nuanced perspective on all of the circumstances that set up success in spite of all other factors.
Malcolm Gladwell does another masterful job of diving into the complexities of social psychology; employing his usual story telling narrative style, along with data, and engaging anecdotes. Specifically, this book navigates through relatedness and definitions of IQ, EQ, and SQ. It builds from those foundations to ask how the odd formula of balancing those three along with “lucky” breaks help us see the true story behind success and failure.
My individual perspective leads me to believe that who we are comes down to 1 part nature (IQ) plus 2 parts nurture (environment [EQ + SQ]). The bigger take away is that we have to really look at, what Gladwell calls the Cultural Heredity, of various scenarios to get to the root circumstances that filter people into successful, average, and failing buckets. Then ask ourselves, is the system itself producing outliers by way of some unseen flaw or is the playing field level and we are really seeing the cream of the crop?
Malcolm Gladwell does another masterful job of diving into the complexities of social psychology; employing his usual story telling narrative style, along with data, and engaging anecdotes. Specifically, this book navigates through relatedness and definitions of IQ, EQ, and SQ. It builds from those foundations to ask how the odd formula of balancing those three along with “lucky” breaks help us see the true story behind success and failure.
My individual perspective leads me to believe that who we are comes down to 1 part nature (IQ) plus 2 parts nurture (environment [EQ + SQ]). The bigger take away is that we have to really look at, what Gladwell calls the Cultural Heredity, of various scenarios to get to the root circumstances that filter people into successful, average, and failing buckets. Then ask ourselves, is the system itself producing outliers by way of some unseen flaw or is the playing field level and we are really seeing the cream of the crop?