Outliers: The Story of Success

Why are people successful? For centuries, humankind has grappled with this question, searching for the secret to accomplishing great things. In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever.

He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from. Gladwell examines how the careers of Bill Gates and the performance of world-class football players are alike; why so many top lawyers are Jewish; why Asians are good at maths and why it is correct to say that the mathematician who solved Fermat's Theorem is not a genius.

Like Blink, this is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.

Malcolm Gladwell

Author, journalist, cultural commentator and intellectual adventurer, Malcolm Gladwell was born in 1963 in England to a Jamaican mother and an English mathematician father. He grew up in Canada and 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. His curiosity and breadth of interests are shown in New Yorker articles ranging over a wide array of subjects including early childhood development and the flu, not to mention hair dye, shopping and what it takes to be cool.

His phenomenal bestseller The Tipping Point captured the world’s attention with its theory that a curiously small change can have unforeseen effects, and the phrase has become part of our language, used by writers, politicians and business people everywhere to describe cultural trends and strange phenomena.

How first impressions lead to snap judgements inspired his next bestselling book, BLINK: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, which reveals how the power of 'blink' could fundamentally transform our relationships, the way we consume, create and communicate, how we run our businesses and even our societies.

OUTLIERS: The Story of Success, is Gladwell’s eagerly anticipated new book on success. It takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever. Just as he did in BLINK, Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions and creates an entirely new model for seeing the world.

"The most influential thinker for the i-pod generation"
The Observe