12/31/2023 0 Comments Showoff book summary![]() Mozart had innate talent, but he also had been practicing the art of composing a concerto for nine years before he produced his first masterpiece. Even if one is born with some innate talent, without the financial resources, spare time, and support system that make thousands of hours of practice possible, success may still be out of reach. Great success requires an enormous amount of practice, a point that Gladwell famously backed up by showing that highly successful people often spent ten thousand hours or more practicing. Two other success factors that Gladwell explores are practice time and social skills. Arbitrary factors like these can have a huge effect on the life trajectories of children. The older students then receive more attention, praise, and opportunity in class as a result, even though their “merit” derived merely from being older (and therefore, “wiser”). A similar phenomenon can be observed in schools, where the older kids in the class often test better than younger students. Thus, whether he or she is born in January or July can dramatically impact a young person’s chances of going on to play professional hockey in Canada, professional baseball in the US, or soccer in Europe. For instance, he points out that athletes born in certain months (after a particular age cut-off date) are older and bigger, receive more attention as kids, and therefore tend to achieve more success in sports. Gladwell argues that achievement and expertise don’t just happen, but rather they result from a combination of various crucial and sometimes seemingly superficial contextual factors. Gladwell’s primary objective in Outliers is to show that assumptions like these are often wrong. They possess innate talent, drive, and determination, and they are rewarded with great success. He notes that we tend to believe in the predominance of “individual merit.” We believe people are unusually successful because they are unusually gifted. Gladwell begins by exploring what we tend to think about particularly successful people: famous athletes, multi-millionaires, Nobel Prize winners, or titans of business, for example. ![]() Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers examines the nature of success using various success stories as case studies.
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