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  1. Outliers Full Book Summary. In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell considers the circumstances that lead to success. The first half of the book looks closely at how opportunities matter more in the lives of successful people than hard work or raw talent. The second half of the book focuses on cultural legacies: behavioral ...

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    • Analysis: Introduction: The Roseto Mystery & Chapter 1: The Matthew Effect

    In the late 1800s, immigrants from Roseto Valfortore, Italy, came to Pennsylvania to work in the slate quarry near the town of Bangor. The settlers established a new community, named after their old one: Roseto. They built schools, a park, small shops, and more than a dozen factories. They kept to themselves and did not interact much with the predo...

    Wolf was forced to rule out diet and lifestyle as explanations, because the Rosetans had poor eating habits, smoked heavily, and were obese. He ruled out genetics after determining that Rosetans’ relatives in other parts of the country were not in comparably good health. Wolf eventually decided that what made Roseto’s inhabitants so healthy was the...

    In the 1980s, Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley observed that on elite Canadian hockey teams, whether youth league or NHL, a disproportionate number of players have birthdays in the first three months of the year.

    The explanation for the distribution of birthdays is simple: the cutoff date for an individual’s league assignment is January 1. A player born on January 2 will be 12 months older than one born at the end of December. At the age of nine or ten, this often translates into a huge difference in size, coordination, and maturity. By age ten, coaches reg...

    The top-level hockey players were given opportunities they neither deserved nor earned. Sociologist Robert Merton called this the “Matthew Effect,” after the verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” The successful re...

    Gord Wasden, the father of one of the Canadian Hockey League boys from the first section, describes his son. Scott Wasden worked hard to get where he is, but he has also generally had the advantage of being big compared to others on his team. He was born on January 4.

    Gladwell's thesis argues that that the idea of rugged, individual success is not accurate. Rather, the most successful person doesn’t thrive without some environmental and social influence plus a dose of good fortune. After laying out the concepts of a meritocracy and suggesting that this is the way that hockey players advance in Canada, he immedia...

  2. Chapter Summary; Introduction: In the 1960s Dr. Stewart Wolf discovered the rate of death from heart disease in Roseto, Pennsylvania, was half that of ... Read More: Part 1, Chapter 1: Author Malcolm Gladwell's goal in Outliers is to prove "there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense o... Read More: Part 1, Chapter 2

    Chapter
    Summary
    Introduction
    In the 1960s Dr. Stewart Wolf discovered ...
    Part 1, Chapter 1
    Author Malcolm Gladwell's goal in ...
    Part 1, Chapter 2
    For years psychologists have believed " ...
    Part 1, Chapter 3
    Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology ...
  3. Outliers, a work of nonfiction published in 2008, is the third nonfiction book by famed Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell. In this thought-provoking work, Gladwell explores the factors that contribute to high levels of success and achievement. The book challenges conventional notions of individual success, arguing that external factors ...

  4. Outliers Summary. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers examines the nature of success using various success stories as case studies. Gladwell begins by exploring what we tend to think about particularly successful people: famous athletes, multi-millionaires, Nobel Prize winners, or titans of business, for example. He notes that we tend to believe in ...

  5. In a long Epilogue, Gladwell shows how his own family’s background and culture, going back several generations, influenced his mother’s life and thus his own. Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study ...

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  7. Analysis. 1. Gladwell opens the chapter with a seemingly innocuous description of a Canadian hockey player’s rise to the top of the sport in Canada. A young boy has talent as a child, is found by a talent scout, and works hard to rise to the top of the Canadian hockey meritocracy. His individual merit is the reason for his success.

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