Outliers Malcolm Gladwell Summary

Malcolm Gladwell opens his bestselling book Outliers: The Story of Success with the story of Stewart Wolf, a physician who revolutionized our understanding of health. Wolf studied digestion at the University of Oklahoma and spent his summers at a farm in Pennsylvania. One summer, Wolf was astounded to hear from a colleague that it was extremely rare to “find anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart disease” (Gladwell 6). At the time, heart attacks “were the leading cause of death in men under the age of sixty-five” (6). Wolf, intrigued, enlisted the help of a sociologist named John Bruhn and began to study what it was that made Roseto, Pennsylvania different from the rest of the country; what made it an outlier. The Rosetans
Gladwell takes the reader through pretty much the entirety of Terman’s study, including its surprising end. In the end, Terman looked at the data of 730 men and found that in determining which of the Termites were successful, “only one thing mattered: family background.” (111) Gladwell uses the study of the Termites to prove his thesis that family background is more important than anyone could have imagined. Gladwell also writes about how “traditional” success stories, people rising to the top from nothing, are mostly false; those people almost always have help and he uses the story of his mother to prove it. Gladwell first tells the simplified story of his mother, and then goes back and adds in all of the help she had and all of the extraordinary opportunities awarded to her. His mother, Joyce Gladwell, a Jamaican native, was born at just the right time to be eligible for a scholarship for “academically minded students to go to private high schools.” (273) And when Joyce was not awarded the scholarship and her twin sister was, their mother Daisy Nation decided to send both of the girls to private school anyway. As it turns out, another girl at the school won two scholarships and gave one of them to