Book Review - Outliers: The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell Subject: Successful people Publisher: Little Brown & Co., New York Year: 2008 ISBN: 9780316017930 Despite easy to read, I think the book does not convey many new ideas as to what makes people succeed. The nexus of the book is that successful people, no matter how gifted, do not make things by themselves; rather they owe a big part of it to the conducive environment in which they are in. Therefore we should not totally take in the notion of "self-made billionaires/innovators" but instead look carefully how their surroundings have assisted them in making their achievement. Though the stories flow well, I think the whole thesis is no much different from the notion of fundamental attribution error we learnt from psychology classes. The fact that we tend to make internal attribution to explain the people's behavio...