In this book, Gladwell talks about ice hockey players and their birthdays. He asserts that almost all the best Canadian ice hockey players are born around the same months in any year (January – March). If you are born any month after the age brackets they use to group kids in the minor leagues, you will be younger and smaller than the other players in the team.

The older kids start off with an advantage over you and this gets further compounded, when they get more practice and experience than you. The groundwork for their becoming a top professional player/ outlier is already laid. Natural ability coupled with right circumstances, and the 10,000 Hour rule, birth an outlier. Ken Langone the founder of Home Depot has much to say about this in his book I Love Capitalism!

Jewish Americans began as humble immigrants. Generations of hard work, grit and focused determination, had them take generational leaps in prosperity. They grew from a poor, small community doing menial jobs to the current generations of hotshot lawyers. The early generations worked hard to improve their lot in life and educated their children, opening up more avenues to them.

There are also some shocking references to plane crashes and culture which are remarkable to say the least. As mentioned previously each chapter is independent from the others, so if you’re falling out of love with a particular topic, just skip to the next chapter. Another book that is good to bounce around like this more focused on success in business than anything else is The Messy Middle.

This book throws up some salient parenting tips. Bring up your children with a sense of entitlement. This sense of entitlement will hold them in good stead as they grow into adults. They will be able to use this trait to demand and negotiate higher salaries and better jobs.

A lack of this attitude of entitlement, will make you believe that you should defer to people in authority. You are less likely to question them. You blindly follow rules.

Create a conducive environment for your kids to exercise their talents and interests and bestow a sense of entitlement and watch them become a success in life.

Outliers rarely become successful only on account of natural ability. Opportunity, persistence, the 10,000 Hour rule, cultural advantage, and background, are all essential ingredients to the perfect outlier recipe. Reading this book will help you identify the areas in which you are an outlier and proceed to leverage that to be successful in life. Unsure how to identify this? Read the book Linchpin and discover your superpower.

As you journey through the book, lively prose, anecdotes, quotes grab and hold your attention. This is a dense book and has nine chapters. You could probably aim to go through on chapter a month, in order to fully appreciate and comprehend the content therein. Each chapter is incredibly different from the other, it feels like you have been handed nine books for the price of one.

This book was number one on The New York Times bestseller list for eleven consecutive weeks and rightly so.

About The Author Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell is an exceptional journalist, author and public speaker. He began his career as a writer for The New Yorker. He is author of 6 best-selling books, and Outliers was his 3rd book, published in 2008.

Gladwell is co-founder of podcast company, Pushkin Industries. He is the host of the podcast, Revisionist History. His podcasts began in 2016 and has aired 4 successful seasons since.

He is also involved in a music podcast, Broken Record, which is in its 2nd season currently. Here, he interviews musicians.