My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers is uplifting because it promises us we can master our destinies. What at first blush might correctly be seen as a debunking of the notion that genius is the sole product of mysterious innate ability is also a celebration of the confluence of natural ability, unusual opportunity, dedicated practice and good fortune that has produced such prodigious individuals as Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Canada's hockey champions, classical musicians, Asian math champions, New York's Jewish lawyers, and even a bestselling half-Jamaican Canadian author.
An essential ingredient in Gladwell's recipe for genius is hard work, at least 10,000 hours of practice before one reaches true proficiency in any discipline. A predicate for that kind of practice, however, is not merely inner discipline but opportunity. Bill Joy and Bill Gates had rare opportunities in the form of essentially unlimited free access to programming time on computers at a time when such access was a rare commodity. Coupled with this rare access in their youth, they along with most other household names in the computer industry were able to gain such extraordinary experience at just the moment when the computer industry was undergoing a tectonic shift from the clunky batch-programmed mainframes that had hitherto dominated the industry to the revolutionary light personal computers that represented the future. A few years earlier and they would have been wedded to the mainframe dinosaurs of the past, a few years later and they would they would have been too late to play a critical role in shaping the future and would simply have joined the herd rather than leading the charge.
Gladwell's conclusion is that once we dispense with the notion that genius is spontaneous, innate, and mysterious, we are liberated to cultivate it. To be sure, not every seed will grow to be a Giant Sequoia, but even the seeds of the Giant Sequoia will come to nothing if they are cast upon dry stone. And Gladwell broadens his analysis to include not merely a condemnation of lack of opportunity, but also a critique of culture. In successive examples, he shows that the occupations cultures pursue, the hardships they suffer, and even the syntax of their language and content of their manners can have a critical effect on their economic success, job performance, or intellectual achievement. Far from succumbing to a crude determinism, however, Gladwell holds forth the possibility that by enriching our children's opportunities and examining our thinking, we can create the conditions necessary for civilization to flourish in new abundance.