Outliers was the first Malcolm Gladwell book that I read and enjoyed from cover to cover. I believe the central idea of the book is: You can’t understand a tree without understanding the forest it’s in. You can’t make sense of a person without studying her peers, her community, the age she was born and raised in. (See: Socialization) The cool thing is, a tree can’t uproot itself and go to another forest- but a man can get up and walk, and he can modify his peer group. (To a certain degree, at least.)

I wasn’t entirely ignorant of this before, but this gave me a clearer picture. It make me aware of a specific point-of-view I could use, a way of seeing the world.

We can’t evaluate ourselves without contemplating everything around us. Our successes and failures are not entirely our own. This means that we can’t entirely take credit for anything we accomplish, and we can’t entirely blame others when they fail or screw up. (Inversely, we can’t entirely credit others or blame ourselves, either, but we’re naturally biased not to do that: see Self-serving bias.)