Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell was published in 2008. This non-fiction book shows how factors other than intelligence, ambition, and personality create successful people. 

Blurb from the back of the book: In understanding successful people, we have come to focus far too much on their intelligence and ambition and personality traits. Instead, Malcolm Gladwell argues in Outliers, we should look at the world that surrounds the successful - their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way, Gladwell reveals what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the reason you've never heard of the smartest man in the world, why almost no star hockey players are born in the fall, and why, when it comes to plane crashes, where the pilots are born matters as much as how well they are trained. 

The lives of outliers - people whose achievements fall outside normal experience - follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in uncovering that logic, Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.  

I listened to the audio book and found it interesting and feel this book is important for teachers and parents to read. I wish he had included a woman outlier in this work - are there no women outliers?

Read to a child today even if that child is you. 

Link to our NICU book registry to donate books to babies in the newborn intensive care unit so their parents can read to them while they grow. You can also donate gently used books to our project by sending them to me or to Angie. Email me for a mailing address. We can use both English and Spanish books. If you have a graduate of the NICU, or if you have a baby whose life you would like to honor by donating books to this project, let me know, and I can make a book plate with their name for the books you donate.