Title: Outliers – The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Genre: Nonfiction
If you don’t want your illusions about individual success punctured, don’t read this book.
But if you want a good explanation of what made the Beatles such great musicians, Bill Gates so rich, or Asian kids so good at math, settle in with this one.
In essence, Gladwell analyzes and picks apart success stories, and looks behind the scenes, discarding the notion of luck and instead looking at measurable data. For example, there’s an age bias in young Canadian hockey players towards January, February, and March births…because the age cutoff in January 1, and these kids are the oldest ones in their year. The effect of the selection bias is compounded by extra coaching, practice, and opportunities.
And speaking of practice, if you want to get really good at something, Gladwell’s research suggests that you should spend about 10,000 hours doing it (that’s 5-10 years). Guess who started programming practically around the clock at age 13? Of course, it didn’t hurt that there was a bug in the University of Washington’s computer system that essentially gave the young Mr Gates unlimited free computer time on a state of the art machine…in 1968.
Gladwell’s research also shows that it helps to be born at the right time—old enough to take advantage of an opportunity without being too old to still have the mental flexibility and lifestyle that supports risk-taking.
But mostly, you have to work hard and spend a lot of time at something to be good at it. Which is why Japanese kids who spend 243 days a year in school are much better at math than American kids who spend 180 days per year in school…and forget a lot of what they’ve learned over the long summer break. Of course, it also helps that Japanese (and Chinese) are much more regular languages than English when it comes to numbers and mathematics. Of course, that cultural bias can also work against you, which is why the official language of Korean Air is now English.
So, if you want to be really successful, you have to be born in the right place at the right time to the right parents, make sure that any selection biases are in your favor (even if they seem like disadvantages at the time) and spend a lot of time working very hard.
Gladwell’s point, though is not so much that if it were that simple, everyone would do it. His point is that there really is no such thing as a self-made person. Success is the product of “history and community, of opportunity and legacy.” And if you think about it, that does that make more sense than a lone individual struggling alone against incredible odds. Maybe that’s not as appealing a story to ruggedly individualistic American sensibilities…but it does mean that each of us has the opportunity to help others succeed, and we too can succeed if we work hard, seize opportunities, and let others help us as we help them. Maybe it’s not as good a story, but it sounds like a better ending to me.