Outliers

Malcolm Gladwell, “Outliers: The Story of Success”, 2008, Little Brown and Co., 287 pp. (Read the Kindle version: Library Checkout). 

This book deals with what it is that leads an individual to be a high-achiever. Past searches for what is essential has led to erroneous conclusions when we concentrate on what is different about the successful and not on where they are from: that is, their culture, family, time of birth, and the luck that their experiences yield. Throughout, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. The closer we look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this 10,000-hour number comes up again and again. However, hard work goes hand-in-hand with opportunity. Your intellectual potential might have you be a great computer programmer, mathematician, or businessman. Unfortunately, it might very well go to waste without the resources needed to foster the development of such potential—extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.

The book's thesis can be summed up in this quote: "...success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities--and who have the strength and presence of mind to seize them. ...To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all."


My Notes:
Pg. 19: People don’t arise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. Successful people 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. It is not enough to ask what successful people are like; it is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.

Pg. 22: Studies found that there were nearly five and a half times as many Ontario Junior Hockey League players born in January as were born in November. Further evidence revealed that in any elite group of Canadian hockey players—the very best of the best—40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December. The explanation is simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year—at that age, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity. So ability is confused with maturity—the same thing occurs in academics at this age.

Pg. 30: This phenomenon in which "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is dubbed "accumulative advantage" by Gladwell, while sociologist Robert K. Merton calls it "the Matthew Effect", named after a biblical verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on natural abilities.

Pg. 38: It has generally been claimed that ‘Achievement is talent plus preparation.’ The problem is, the closer we look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.

Pg. 79: The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. Every bit as important as IQ is social savvy. Social savvy is knowledge. It is a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families, (I would add: peers, and role models).

Pg. 137: For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time; the perfect birth date for a New York Jewish lawyer is 1930 because that would give the lawyer the benefit of a blessedly small generation of competitors. It would also make him forty years of age in 1970 when the revolution in the legal world first began. This is comparable to being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 for an entrepreneur.

Pg. 149: Three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying are autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It is whether our work fulfills us. Most would rather be a $75K per year architect than a $100K toll booth worker.

Pg. 167: A culture of honor is a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth. The Appalachia area inhabitants came from one of the world’s most ferocious cultures of honor: Scotch-Irish.

Pg. 197: Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid or inhibited to speak up. Airlines now have programs to mitigate against this deference to rank and these programs are credited with dramatically lowering airline incidents and accidents.

Pg. 248: We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work. The countries at the top of the list are Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan.

Pg. 258: Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it. The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long and the Japanese is 243. For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem, it has a summer vacation problem.

addenda:
In Galdwell's theory, the primary driving force behind someone's becoming an outlier from their peers is their exposure to conditions, resources, or other circumstances that their peers are not