Books for decision makers Vol 7- Outliers
The Story of Success
As a society, we like to lionize those who rise up and achieve success on their own merit. Presently, such figures dominate our cultural consciousness, whether they are athletes, artists, musicians, politicians, or tech magnates. We hold them up as the kinds of people who, through intelligence, talent, and creativity came to amass fortunes, gain recognition and change the world around them. However, some may be inclined to ask how much such people succeeded due to their own abilities as opposed to the circumstances that shaped them and the opportunities they were presented that may not have been available to others.
Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author, argues in favor of the latter in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. Citing a myriad of social, economic, cultural, and historical factors, he argues that the lives and careers of the most successful individuals are shaped by events and forces that may not even occur to them.
The main arguments found in Outliers can be summarized as follows:
Timing matters. An individual's chances of success can be determined by the times in which they live and, for some people, their exact date of birth.
Practice, practice, practice. Few succeed without getting at least 10,000 hours of experience. How and whether those 10,000 hours are achieved can be determined by unpredictable factors.
Genius isn't enough. If IQ alone were sufficient for success, success would be reached 100% of the time, but that’s not the case. A good upbringing and practical intelligence can also go a long way.
Cultural legacies have strengths and weaknesses. Some people benefit from the cultures in which they are raised. In other cases however, cultural inheritance must be challenged in order for the person to succeed.
Get rid of "lucky breaks." Our social, governmental, and educational systems too often raise up a lucky few while denying the same chances to others. For a truly equitable society to emerge, we must address those problems.
Factors of success
The first factor of unseen preparation for success that Gladwell touches on is when a person is born. Looking at the birth dates of Canadian professional hockey players, he notes that most of them are born in the first three months of the year. It is a strange statistic, he points out, because Canadian hockey is, in theory, a meritocracy. Players of all social and economic backgrounds begin at a young age and subsequently rise up through the ranks based on their skills.
By the time they reach maturity, the best of the best have been filtered out and are eligible to compete professionally. However, according to Gladwell, the policy of grouping young players by the year in which they were born inadvertently gives an advantage to children born closest to the cutoff date. For pre-adolescent children, he argues, even the slightest difference in age can manifest itself as more advanced athletic abilities in older players. Consequently, the more athletic older children are the ones most likely to be selected for the more elite youth hockey leagues and therefore given a better shot at making it to the big leagues. The same is the case with other youth activities with age-based placement. Even in grade schools, children born toward the beginning of the academic year are likely to outperform their younger classmates.
The importance of when a person was born does not only apply to time of year. Decades and generations can have a significant impact. Whenever there are significant changes in economic development, science, or technology, it is usually likely that only people of a certain age group will reap the benefits. To back up his point, Gladwell lists the best-known tech entrepreneurs, including: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Eric Schmidt. All of them, he points out, were born in the mid 1950s. Therefore, all came of age as great technological advancements were underway, thus putting them in a good position to take advantage of them.
One aspect of the lives of successful people that Gladwell is adamant in emphasizing is what he calls the "10,000-hour rule." This, he writes, is the tendency of most people to only master a profession or activity after accruing at least ten thousand hours of practice. As an example, he once again invokes Bill Gates, who loved computers from childhood and began programming at the age of thirteen. By the time Gates started Microsoft, Gladwell says, he had accumulated years of practice as a computer programmer. Another example that Gladwell cites is the success of the Beatles, who rigorously honed their craft during their early days in Hamburg.
At first glance, Bill Gates and the Beatles appear as mere confirmations of the principle that practice makes perfect. Anyone can succeed through hard work and dedication. To Gladwell, however, it isn't that simple. Circumstances, as always, played a significant role.
Despite his obvious intelligence and talent, Gates probably would not have had the chance to work so frequently with computers had his affluent parents not enrolled him in an elite Seattle prep school with its own computer science program, a rarity in the 1960s. He also benefited enormously from his close proximity to the University of Washington, where he frequently spent his spare time coding on a state-of-the-art computer. The Beatles, meanwhile, only ended up in Hamburg because of a chance meeting between a German club owner and a businessman from Liverpool who arranged to send over bands from his hometown. If the promoter had stuck with his original plan, which was to book bands from London, the world may have never heard of the Beatles. A similar case can be made for the Canadian hockey players, who got the opportunity to put in their ten thousand hours in part because they were fortunate enough to be born in the early months of the year.
One can argue that Bill Gates and the Beatles were simply geniuses, perhaps destined to succeed because of their outstanding abilities. The contrarian Gladwell throws cold water on such a notion with a chapter entitled: "The Trouble with Geniuses." To demonstrate said trouble, he draws on two examples.
One is Chris Langan, a man who, despite having an off-the-charts IQ, dropped out of college twice and now lives on a Missouri horse farm. The other is Robert Oppenheimer, the nuclear physicist who led the Manhattan Project in spite of having once tried to murder one of his professors in graduate school.
As a young man, Langan seemed destined for intellectual achievement, impressing all around him with his aptitude for science, mathematics, and philosophy. However, he grew up poor in a terrifyingly dysfunctional household and went to college completely unprepared for the world of academia. To make matters worse, his professors and advisors showed little sympathy for his misfortunes and callously allowed him to fail.
Oppenheimer, by contrast, grew up wealthy with parents who gladly cultivated his intellectual curiosity. After graduating from Harvard, he went to graduate school at the University of Cambridge, where he suffered a breakdown and attempted to poison his tutor. Instead of expelling him, the university put Oppenheimer on probation and mandated that he get counseling.
In telling the stories of these two men, Gladwell demonstrates the importance of upbringing in intellectual development. Although both Langan and Oppenheimer were highly intelligent, they ended up on divergent paths in large part due to their experiences in their formative years. To provide broader context to the stories, Gladwell cites a sociological study that suggests that children whose parents nurture their talents (almost exclusively an upper and middle-class phenomenon) through support and extracurricular activities are more likely to succeed. Furthermore, children from such a background are more likely to develop the kind of world-wise savvy that Oppenheimer- -in his extreme case- utilized to evade punishment for attempted murder and later in helping to develop the atomic bomb. If Langan had experienced the same kind of cultivating environment that Oppenheimer had enjoyed in his youth, perhaps he would have become a world-renowned intellectual as well.
One of the factors that Gladwell asserts has a deep impact on a person's likelihood of success, is cultural legacy. He argues that we are shaped by the cultures in which we grow up, sometimes in ways that may surprise us.
Certain cultural environments can have a profoundly positive impact on a person's chances of success within a certain discipline, Gladwell states. To illustrate his point, he tells of how antisemitism in the American legal profession resulted in Jewish lawyers being relegated to the less-than-prestigious practice of litigation. However, when the economic climate changed and litigators found themselves in high demand, those Jewish lawyers began enjoying unprecedented success.
Gladwell also cites the common work ethic found in Asian countries. He points out that cultures in East Asia tend to value hard work more than their western counterparts. This, he says, is what accounts for higher levels of proficiency in math among Asians, rejecting lazier assumptions that they are somehow innately skilled at the subject.
For every strength inherent in cultural legacy, there is, however, a weakness. Gladwell somewhat ghoulishly explains this through the stories of two horrific plane crashes: Korean Air 801 and the Colombian airliner Avianca 052. In both cases, the planes were in dire situations but the flight crews failed to take the drastic actions necessary to avert disaster. Gladwell attributes those failures to the reluctance of the crews to assert themselves in the face of authority. In the case of Korean Air, the co-pilot and flight engineer did not speak up out of fear of rebuke by their dictatorial captain; in the moments before the Avianca crash, the captain and his subordinates were too intimidated by pushy New York air traffic controllers to fully articulate their dire need to land before running out of fuel. Rather than tell their superiors- real or perceived- in strong terms that there was a problem, they tried to communicate their concerns meekly and politely, terminating in fatal results.
Such reluctance to challenge authority, according to Gladwell, can be explained using the "Power Distance Index" (PDI). Both airlines were based in countries where hierarchy and respect for authority are deeply ingrained. Thus, the flight crews were reluctant to challenge authority, even in the face of death.
There are ways to overcome the weaknesses inherent in cultural legacies. After Korean Air 801 crashed, the airline responded by hiring an American named David Greenberg to manage its flight operations. Greenberg made significant changes to training and instilled in pilots what Gladwell calls an "alternate identity." No longer would they be constrained by overbearing hierarchical tendencies in the workplace.
Another example that Gladwell cites is the success of the experimental KIPP education program in the United States. Through rigorous teaching that goes on from the early morning until the evening, the program has had remarkable success in educating students from low-income households. The success, Gladwell argues, is the result of KIPP's challenging of the traditional laxity in American education regarding time and effort imposed upon students.
Toward the end of the book, Gladwell summarizes his arguments regarding the prerequisites for success, but he also argues that the conditions he has laid out don't necessarily reflect well on our society. There is a lot of wasted potential left in the wake of events and circumstances that propel "outliers" to success. For every talented person who gets ahead, there are many more who are left behind, whether they are Chris Langan, Korean pilots, or Canadian hockey players born late in the year.
On its face, Outliers appears to be a book about what makes people successful. It's much more than that, though. In describing the conditions and factors that enable success in individuals, Gladwell has also provided a commentary on the world in which we live and how we can adapt to it.
Rielley Duckworth
Macrowise Content Collaborator
October 17th, 2019