This book is a Christmas present from a friend in the UK. It’d been lying in my shelf for at least 2 or 3 years till i picked it up. And guess what, I’ve really enjoyed it. I don’t understand how i could have not heard about this author all these years. Malcolm Gladwell, one of the Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2005.

“OUTLIERS – the story of success”. There are a lot of interesting research findings in it, it doesn’t just tell you how to be successful, not at all (in fact in a lot of cases it’s telling you you can’t be the extraordinary one because of …). But he really helps to make sense of many things…

Now i know why in my class there are always more students born in the first half of the year, and what we might do to change this; how certain people become so successful not due to their “gifted talent” but they’ve worked more than 10,000 hours before they reached where they’re today; why certain airlines of certain social psychologists defined cultures are more likely to crash; why maths of children from certain regions of Asia are better than the rest of the world and it has nothing to do with their “IQ” or “inherited abilities”; how children are brought up matters a lot – parenting styles, what they do during summers, social classes too! Rich students learnt more in the summer term than throughout the whole school year! Etc etc.

I don’t want to spoil the book. But I’m going to read another of his book. It’s not so much clinical psychology, but psychology in general. Anyone can read, anyone! And I’d particularly recommend it to parents and parents-to-be.

“Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”