Malcolm Gladwell is the dyanamic journalist from the New Yorker magazine and inadvertent marketing guru who was reading the Bible at the age of six. Famous for his big hair, the writer admits to being “obsessed with failure,” claiming mistakes are more interesting than success. And after fumbling an early career in advertising and being fired from his first editorial job for oversleeping, the Canadian-raised marketing sensation is well acquainted with failure.
However, his book Outliers investigates the opposite phenomenon, examining high-achievers and what makes them exceptional. Arguing we spend too much time scrutinizing the personal characteristics of successful people and not enough time considering their background, Gladwell claims innate talent is by no means the key to success.
The New Yorker writer denounces pop culture institutions such as American Idol which “encourage the false belief that there’s a kind of magic, that you can be discovered.” Alternatively, Gladwell argues many high-flyers have logged at least 10,000 hours of practice in their field before hitting the big time.
“The Beatles had a musical gift, but what made them the Beatles was a random invitation to play in Hamburg… where they performed live as much as five hours a night, seven days a week. Talented? Absolutely,” he says. “But they also simply put in more hours than anyone else.”
The British-born child of two published authors, Gladwell inadvertently became a publishing sensation and international marketing connoisseur with the release of his first book The Tipping Point in 2000. Fast forward, and Gladwell was named one of the Time Magazine' s 100 Most Influential People (2005), earns more than enough to get by on public speaking gigs, and has two New York Times bestselling books in print. There are more than 800,000 copies of his second book, Blink, in circulation.
In this stunning and fascinating book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Defining that precise moment when a trend becomes a trend, Malcolm Gladwell probes the surface of everyday occurrences to reveal some surprising dynamics behind explosive social changes. He examines the power of word-of-mouth and explores how very small changes can directly affect popularity. Perceptive and imaginative, The Tipping Point is a groundbreaking book destined to overturn conventional thinking in business, sociological, and policy-making arenas.
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How do we make decisions--good and bad--and why are some people so much better at it than others? That's the question Malcolm Gladwell asks and answers in the follow-up to his huge bestseller, The Tipping Point. Utilizing case studies as diverse as speed dating, pop music, and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, Gladwell reveals that what we think of as decisions made in the blink of an eye are much more complicated than assumed. Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology, he shows how the difference between good decision-making and bad has nothing to do with how much information we can process quickly, but on the few particular details on which we focus. Leaping boldly from example to example, displaying all of the brilliance that made The Tipping Point a classic, Gladwell reveals how we can become better decision makers--in our homes, our offices, and in everyday life.
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