Just to keep track with my goal of reading at least 6 books this year, I really tried to finish this one. So, I found myself reading while falling in line every morning for the UP-SM jeep. It means 5 to 10 mins Monday to Friday. I bought the book in the first place because of the title. Usually, when I run a regression analysis, I tend to disregard the outliers. I'm more focused on the normal distribution. This book though looks at the small dots that are simply further away from the clusters. Well, given that successful people are fewer than normal people, I guess Gladwell maybe right in categorizing them as outliers. But the irony of this book is that once he has isolated the outliers or the successful ones, he looked for the pattern and here he clusters the factors together - making them, his outliers, into part of the "normal distribution."
For Gladwell an outlier becomes one because of "...steady accumulation of advantages." Hence, a successful person is born in a certain era and place with a certain set of parents and a certain "something" while growing up. He cited, the Beatles, Bill Gates and Jewish lawyers in NYC during the late 1980s to 1990s as examples. It's not really unusual to learn that geniuses are not created overnight. In fact Gladwell, goes as far back as the circumstances and the evolution of a certain culture to determine the success of their people. AND yes, basically why Asians are generally good in Math.
