Malcolm Gladwell Brings OUTLIERS to Santa Barbara 3/10/10

Bestselling non-fiction author Malcolm Gladwell is coming to Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theater Wednesday March 10 to speak about his 2008 book, Outliers: The Story of Success, where he reveals the real – and mostly overlooked – secrets to extraordinary success, suggesting that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, family and generation.

For example, in an interview on NPR that I listened to, he attributes the success story of Bill Gates to the fact that, in the 1960s, Bill Gates just happened to attend one of the rare high schools in the United States that not only had a computer hooked up to a mainframe, but to which Gates had access. That time in high school where Gates had the opportunity to program and experiment on a computer gave him a jump ahead of his whole generation when it came to becoming successful in the field of computers.

Tickets for the event are a hefty $33. Learn more about Malcolm Gladwell and buy tickets here.

As much as I’d love to go hear him speak, with money as tight as it is right now for us with the Big Monkey out for two more months on disability and me on unemployment, I am wondering if the money and time would be better spent buying and reading his book, reading his blog,  and listening to his TED talk or other youtubes than driving to Santa Barbara and attending. I could hang around outside the theater beforehand with my finger stuck hopefully in the air like at a Grateful Dead show, and see if anyone has an extra ticket to give me…or maybe I can get in as an usher? Where there’s a will there’s a way I always say.

Want to know more about him? Here’s the bio from his website: Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine since 1996. His 1999 profile of Ron Popeil won a National Magazine Award, and in 2005 he was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. He is the author of three books, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference,” (2000) , “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” (2005), and “Outliers: The Story of Success” (2008) all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.

From 1987 to 1996, he was a reporter with the Washington Post, where he covered business, science, and then served as the newspaper’s New York City bureau chief. He graduated from the University of Toronto, Trinity College, with a degree in history. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York City.