Book Review - Outliers #2
We’ll begin the second half of our review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which focuses heavily on legacy, by once again saying how profound we've found the book to be — so simple, and yet so easy to miss the evident deductions from Malcolm.
Discovery Shoppe Book Club comes up with two thought-provoking book reviews per month. These reviews give a good summary of our current read and also serve as a guide to potential readers. Read through for the second half of Outliers.
Outliers: Chapters 6-10
Gladwell began by demonstrating how heavily we are all impacted by our cultural legacies and how much our cultural legacies affect us all, citing the history of the town of Harlan, Kentucky, and the infamous feud between the Howards and the Turners. According to him, cultural legacies, like accents, are passed down even after the circumstances and environments that produced them have long been forgotten, as proven by research conducted at the University of Michigan in the 1990s on the Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South.
The next chapter, on airplane crashes, or, as he puts it, The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes, is just as fascinating. He focuses on several key crashes suffered by Korean Air, emphasizing that air crashes are never caused by a single large, evident error, but rather by an accumulation of small errors, and the incredible yet easily dismissed role ethnicity and communication played in them. I found concepts like ‘mitigated speech’ and ‘Hofstede dimensions’ on crosscultural psychology particularly fascinating. You should read up on it :)
The next chapter, which is based on Stanislas Dehaene’s book, The Number Sense, examines how the naming conventions for numbers affect one’s ability to remember strings of digits. That goes to say that Cantonese have short names for numbers, and thus native speakers can usually remember ten-digit strings. Unlike native English, with its more irregular naming conventions, speakers have only a fifty percent chance of remembering a seven-digit string. This gives the Asians a headstart on memorising numbers.
As well, the limited size of land per family in China or Japan and the lack of advanced machinery for planting and harvesting rice, meant that Asian farmers had to work extra hard - harder than other farmers - to ensure a plentiful harvest. They can only achieve yield gains by working more efficiently and becoming smarter because rice agriculture was skill-oriented unlike machinery oriented in the West. This has instilled in Asians an appreciation for the relationship between hard work and success and has become an ingrained cultural legacy. Gladwell argues that the unique combination of these factors - an established sense of hard work and a great memory for numbers - makes the average Asian a math whiz.
Additionally, Chapter 9 takes us through the life of Marita, a 12-year-old from the United States, whose life was influenced by the KIPP schools, which adapted lessons from the rice paddy fields and achieved a commensurate success rate for the students in the school system. Gladwell also discussed how the US educational system contrasts with that of South Korea and Japan. After reading this chapter, believe me when I say you'll have a lot of questions about summer vacations and the length of a school year.
Finally, Gladwell revisits the various cases throughout Outliers: “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” Instead of fixating on the myth that only the best and brightest can succeed, society should endeavour to create more opportunities for everyone.
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell is indeed a 10/10 book that I would recommend to everyone interested in success. Also, please read the first half of Outliers' book review by the book club to get a full picture of the book! Lastly, remember to follow us on social media.
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Best,
Onyedikachi Nwachukwu
#Outliers #selfhelp #bookreviews
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