On Sunday, even know I am pretty broke right now, I made sure to pick out the new Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, also writer at The New Yorker) book called OULIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS. It's about how Gladwell wanted to get behind the reasons for success, and followed successful people.
In an interview last week, for example, he points out that with mathematics, Westerners tend to think of being "good" or being "bad" at math is something inane in you, and can't be changed. That's it: you're either made to be good at it or bad. In a very telling find, he also notes that the Chinese tend to see being "good" or "bad" at math as something dependent on how hard you work at it. So we Westerners find this excuse, and meanwhile the Chinese say "the heck with that", and lo and behold, who consistently achieves better scores at the SAT, for example? The Chinese.
"Outliers" is a math term and here Malcolm uses it to describe people who live outside of the norm.
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