OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS, by Malcolm Gladwell

OUTLIERS:  THE STORY OF SUCCESS, by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers, begins with a provocative look at why certain five-year-old boys enjoy an advantage in ice hockey, and how these advantages accumulate over time. It also states what Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart had in common: along with talent and ambition, each enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. In the book also, the detailed investigation of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants persuasively explains their rise in 20th-century New York, first in the garment trade and then in the legal profession.

Through case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the robber barons of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to the rise of his own family in Jamaica, the author debunked the myth of individual merit to explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck account for success—and how historical legacies can hold others back despite ample individual gifts. Even as we know how many of these stories end, Gladwell restores the suspense and serendipity to these narratives that make them fresh and surprising.

One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Outliers explored the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years.

Outliers can be enjoyed for its bits of trivia, like why most pro hockey players were born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York, how a pilots' culture impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math. But there's more to it than that. Throughout all of these examples--and in more that delve into the social benefits of lighter skin color, and the reasons for school achievement gaps the author ignited conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture. He leaves us pondering the gifts of our own history, and how the world could benefit if more of our kids were granted the opportunities to fulfill their remarkable potential.

The Outliers posed some challenging questions: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? While challenging our cherished belief of the "self-made man," the author noted the democratic assertion that superstars don't arise out of nowhere, propelled by genius and talent: "they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot." Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, the book builds a convincing case for how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, "some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky."

Outlier's goal is to adjust our understanding of how people get to where they are. Instead of the Horatio Alger story of success — a gifted child who through heroic striving within a meritocratic system becomes a successful (rich, famous, fill in your life goal here) adult — the book tells a story about the context in which success takes place: family, culture, friendship, childhood, accidents of birth and history and geography. "It's not enough to ask what successful people are like," Gladwell noted. "It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."

In some ways, Gladwell himself is, if not an outlier, then at least an outsider. He is both the son of a Jamaican woman in overwhelmingly white Canada and an academic kid from a working-class town (Elmira, Ont.). But the outsider had an in: his father, a mathematician, brought him into the rarefied world of the university. That context is not unconnected to his later success. "As a kid, 11 or something, we would go to his office, and I would wander round," he said. "I got that sense that everybody was so friendly, and their doors were open. I sort of fell in love with libraries at the same time." Now the Author, a New Yorker staff writer, specializes in milling crunchy academic material — psychology experiments, sociological studies, law articles, statistical surveys of plane crashes and classical musicians and hockey players — into prose so silky and accessible, it passes directly into the popular imagination in the form of memes. The most obvious candidate for memification in Outliers is a little gem Gladwell calls the 10,000-Hour Rule. Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It's simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.

Outliers is a more personal book. If you hold it up to the light, at the right angle, you can read it as a coded autobiography: a successful man trying to figure out his own context, how success happened to him and what it means. Gladwell is asking, as he puts it over lunch, "whether successful people deserve the praise we heap on them." After all, it's not as if the Author himself is a genius in any measurable sense. In spite of his patrimony, he had no particular gift for math. He entered college two years early but got lousy grades. ("College was not an intellectually fruitful time for me," he said, with the air of a man euphemizing strenuously.) He was fired from his first job in journalism, at the American Spectator. It wasn't until he wound up at the Washington Post that he really bore down and learned his craft. "I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end," he says. "It took 10 years — exactly that long."  There you have it: the 10,000-Hour Rule in action.

However, according to Outliers, genius isn't the only or even the most important thing. Gladwell's weapon of choice when assaulting myths is the anecdote, and one of the book's most striking, and saddest, is the strange story of Christopher Langan, a man who despite an IQ of 195 (Einstein's was 150) wound up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri. Why isn't he a nuclear rocket surgeon? Because of the environment he grew up in: there was no one in Langan's life and nothing in his background that could help him capitalize on his exceptional gifts. "He had to make his way alone," Gladwell writes, "and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone."
 

Outliers could also be viewed in many ways — as a brief for affirmative action; as a critique of political correctness (some stereotypes, like Asians being good at math, turn out to be true); or even as a defense of Big Government. But it also explains why genius isn't enough. It makes geniuses look a bit less special and the rest of us a bit more so.

In conclusions, the Outliers emphasized persistence and constant practice if we would achieve mastery in whatever we do, stressing the importance of the 10,000 Hours Rule, for no one has succeeded without digging really very deep into whatever area of endeavour the person pursues in life.