Published in 2008, Outliers was the third non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell, who has made a career out of upending conventional wisdom. In Outliers, Gladwell challenges commonly held assumptions about success. Talent and hard work, he argues, are not enough to drive people to the top of their professions: the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with are equally important.
To support this idea, Gladwell examines the lives of men and women whose incredible accomplishments place them outside the realm of ordinary experience. Gladwell calls them outliers, a scientific term for something markedly different than the norm.
Outliers explores why...