The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” I don’t have words to describe this book. I can’t measure the knowledge this book has provided me. This is surely in my top 10. This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things out of ordinary. We relate success with hard work and intelligence but is that all it takes to be successful? ‘Outliers’ tells us about how multiple things revolve simultaneously around us, elucidating readers about secrets behind the successful lives of people like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs, Robert Oppenheimer and other brilliant personalities whom I didn’t know about until I read this book. In the first half of this book Gladwell talks about the main reason behind success: ‘Opportunity’. With the examples of Louis Borgenicht, Mort Janklow, Joe Floem, former Canadian hockey players and many more the author has explained that it makes a difference when and where we grow up. The culture we belong to and the bequest that our ancestors have passed down help us in our achievements. We think it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top but NO, people who are most likely to be given special kinds of opportunities often become successful. The second half of this book talks about ‘legacy’ in which firstly he explains ‘culture of honour’ which persists generation after generation. It matters where you are from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up but in terms of where your great grandparents and great-great-great grandparents grew up. “This is just the beginning, cultural legacies are more powerful than that.” They direct attitudes and behaviours without which we cannot make sense of our world. “The second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role? Can we learn something about why people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously? I think we can.”