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''Outliers: The Story of Success'' is the third non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In ''Outliers'', Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how The Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making, and how two people with exceptional intelligence, Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer, end up with such vastly different fortunes. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours. The publication debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for ''The New York Times'' and ''The Globe and Mail'', holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Generally well received by critics, ''Outliers'' was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much ''Outliers'' felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by ''Outliers'', finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. The writing style, deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex social phenomena. ==Background== Malcolm Gladwell, the author of ''Outliers'', was a journalist for ''The Washington Post'' before writing for ''The New Yorker''. The subjects for his articles, usually non-fiction, range from "Ron Popeil's infomercial empire to computers that analyze pop songs". His familiarity with academic material has allowed him to write about "psychology experiments, sociological studies, law articles, statistical surveys of plane crashes and classical musicians and hockey players", which he converts into prose accessible to a general audience and which sometimes pass as memes into the popular imagination. Before ''Outliers'', Gladwell, who typically writes from a contrarian viewpoint, wrote two best-selling books: ''The Tipping Point'' (2000) and ''Blink'' (2005).〔 Both books have been described as "pop economics".〔 ''The Tipping Point'', which sold 2.5 million copies, focuses on how ideas and behaviors reach critical mass, such as how Hush Puppies rapidly grew popular in the 1990s. ''Blink'', which sold 2 million copies, explains "what happens during the first two seconds we encounter something, before we actually start to think". All Gladwell's books focus on singularities: singular events in ''The Tipping Point'', singular moments in ''Blink'', and singular people in ''Outliers''. Gladwell was drawn to writing about singular things after he discovered that "they always made the best stories".〔 Convinced that the most unusual stories had the best chance of reaching the front page of a newspaper, he was "quickly weaned off the notion that () should be interested in the mundane".〔 For ''Outliers'', Gladwell spent time looking for research that made claims that were contrary to what he considered to be popularly held beliefs. In one of the book's chapters, in which Gladwell focuses on the American public school system, he used research conducted by university sociologist Karl Alexander that suggested that "the way in which education is discussed in the United States is backwards". In another chapter, Gladwell cites pioneering research performed by Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley when discussing how the birthdate of a young hockey player can determine their skill level in the future. While writing the book, Gladwell noted that "the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work."〔 In ''Outliers'', he hopes to show that there are a lot more variables involved in an individual's success than society cares to admit,〔 and he wants people to "move away from the notion that everything that happens to a person is up to that person".〔 Gladwell noted that, although there was little that could be done with regard to a person's fate, society can still impact the "man"-affected part of an individual's success.〔 When asked what message he wanted people to take away after reading ''Outliers'', Gladwell responded, "What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Outliers (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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