Book Report On Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, we uncover the myth behind the notion of an Outlier. It looks at every point that contributes to the success of the individual and shows that most successful people are not outliers by definition. They are successful because of several things and not just because the person is exceptional. The things that the book takes into account are the timing of birth, opportunities during their lives, how much practice they had in their field, IQ, and practical intelligence. These qualities are covered in the first half of the book, and we look at more factors in the second half of the book such as ethnic and cultural influence. Malcolm provides several cases where the timing of birth is a contributing factor to

IQ while a good evaluation of a persons ability to solve logic problems is not the epitome of intelligence. If you have IQ with out practical or social intelligence in a significant quantity it wont garner you much success in the world. It needs an addition of that practical or social intelligence in order for you to become exceptionally successful within the world. The examples put forth in the book are of Chris Langan who’s IQ was in the 190 to 200’s range, Terman’s Termites (a group of students with IQ’s of 140+ that Terman followed for his Genetic Studies of Genius.), and Robert Oppenheimer. We also have two differing tests one that touches on just IQ and the other that touches on practical intelligence. The are Raven’s Progressive Matrices for IQ and a test called a “divergence test” were one uses the imagination to come to a list of conclusions instead of the IQ one where you comb through a list of possibilities and come to a sole conclusion. With the Termites Terman comes to the conclusion that IQ is not the only factor in success as most of them are not exceptionally successful and a good majority is only moderately successful. Between Langan and Oppenheimer the importance of practical intelligence is highlighted glaringly so through the fact that Langan did not know how to socially manipulate a situation to his advantage and Oppenheimer did and there for he(Oppenheimer) was the more successful of the