Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t

  • Malcolm Gladwell | Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Outliers is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In Outliers we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey players and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy. We will investigate the world’s greatest law firm and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual—we will learn that the way we think about success is all wrong.

Speaker Details

Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963 in England, and grew up in Canada. He graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto in 1984. From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter for The Washington Post, first as a science writer and then as New York City bureau chief. Since 1996, he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is also the author of two bestselling books, The Tipping Point and Blink.

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