Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Good insights and thought-provoking: what more do we want?
Summary: 5 Stars
Gladwell's thesis seems to be, "It is hard to understand why some people or groups succeed or fail more than others. Often the answer lies not in their innate talent and intellect, but in cultures they absorbed in their early youth. And sometimes the differences are due to being in the right place at the right time."
As it happened, I had just heard a talk by mystery author Val McDermid a few days before reading this book. McDermid said, "There are many authors as talented and hard-working as I am. They just didn't have the luck I did."
She's right. You can look at almost any life and find an episode that resembles the premise of the movie, Sliding Doors: something either came along or didn't come along at the right time. Or you made one fatal decision and your life shifted irrevocably to a new path.
Academic research recognizes this possibility through several theories, such as chaos theory and life course theory. Published career research has documented the influence of serendipitous events on career paths.
One key event is your date of birth. Gladwell describes a lawyer who was born into an era of low birth rates. This lawyer experienced advantages, such as smaller classes and less competition, not available to his father who was born two decades earlier. I was reminded of research I read a long time ago, comparing success of men drafted into World War II at older or younger ages. Those who joined the military at a young age benefited from the experience; those who joined later saw a lifetime loss of earnings. The differences wasn't due to ability or talent, just their birth date.
I was a little disturbed by Gladwell's interpretation of Chris Langan's failure to meet expectations based on talent. Langan, the man with the IQ of 200, claims he was forced to leave Reed College because his mother wouldn't sign the financial aid form. At Montana State, a professor became defensive when Langan challenged the style of teaching calculus. The administration refused to honor Langan's request to change to afternoon classes so he could get transportation to attend.
As a former college professor, I find these situations extremely plausible, regardless of Langan's social skills. Even in a private school, administrators can be surprisingly rigid. Financial aid officers live in their own worlds.
Gladwell says professors would enjoy engaging with a talented student, but often lower division students are not engaging with experienced professors. They deal with teaching assistants who are struggling with their own professional identity. Fortunately, many universities now have freshman seminars to allow interaction with senior faculty, who would have not only the motivation but also the ability to mentor a struggling student. And a request to change classes after an official registration date will almost always be denied.
Ironically, if Langan had been identified as coming from a disadvantaged population (such as inner city students who get scholarships to prep schools) he would be less of an outlier. These students struggle and I understand that some schools now have special mentoring programs. I know people whose children turned down opportunities to attend elite schools because they wouldn't fit in.
When I read some negative reviews, I often wonder if we're reading the same book. Outliers is not targeted to an audience of research psychologists, although the author does cite academic research throughout the book. You can criticize the way Gladwell interprets the findings of the research. But you can also go through an academic psychology journal and second-guess the authors' interpretation of their data in many published articles.
Are there more rigorous accounts of these phenomena? Sure. Could the book have addressed some counter-examples? Definitely. But it's still a high-quality, thought-provoking read.
Gladwell doesn't write self-help. He presents ideas. Hopefully these ideas will help us understand why large-scale policies work or don't work. If we're in a position to influence change, we can use them. Meanwhile, we can have a lot of fun reading and discussing what Gladwell's written. And if you're motivated to go deeper into social psychology because the book is too light, even better.
Book Review: RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN SAYS: "SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES"
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book to be totally engaging with highly entertaining discussions of success... failure... near misses... and what might have been. The author's discussions include historical figures who made it... and enigmatic figures who missed. Discussed are the required combinations of pieces needed to complete a *SUCCESSFUL-PUZZLE*... as the pieces for some people float by each other as if they are minute particles in an infinite galaxy... while other people who achieve success... are blessed with the same minute pieces of potential... that collide like a monstrous head-on collision... resulting in success.
The material presented ranges from the shockingly high percentage of professional hockey players and baseball players whose birthdays fall within particular months of the year. And after further explanation from the author, the reader (if a sports fan) realizes that the logical explanation was right there in front of you all along. In Little League, Babe Ruth League, etc. there is a legal cutoff birth date for the maximum age of a boy to be allowed to play. (Generally July 31st) Coaches and managers when selecting their high ranking "travel teams" believe the bigger older kids are better... older by up to 364 days if their birthday is August 1st as compared to a boy born on July 31st or earlier. It's an obvious fact that at that age, a boy who is 10-12 months older than another child will be way ahead in size/intelligence/maturity compared to a boy almost one year younger. Once selected for the "special" team... the player will play up to three times as many games in a year... get better specialized coaching... better equipment... and so naturally the odds are much better that later in life, the older boy on the "right" side of the date cutoff will be a better player. If you doubt that "assumption"... how about this: "THERE ARE MORE PLAYERS IN THE MAJOR LEAGUES BORN IN AUGUST THAN IN ANY OTHER MONTH!" "IN 2005 AMONG AMERICANS PLAYING MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL 505 WERE BORN IN AUGUST VERSUS 313 IN JULY." The same truism applies to children when they first start school. There is a date cutoff that can make a 364 day difference in children. The older children learn quicker... are more mature... advanced study groups are formed... "GIFTED" students are put in special classes and the odds are the younger kids may never catch up.
For every hard working successful person reading this book... I guarantee you one of your favorite chapters will be "THE 10,000-HOUR-RULE". Regardless of your occupation: musician/programmer/ballplayer studies show that you did not simply wake up and became a success. Varying examples are given with such wide ranging subjects as "THE BEATLES" and Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. This book will keep your interest with a kaleidoscope like array of fascinating subjects including: A LIST OF THE SEVENTY-FIVE RICHEST PEOPLE IN *HUMAN-HISTORY* and the common connecting outlier... an American with an IQ of *TWO-HUNDRED* (Note: Einstein's IQ was ONE-HUNDRED-FIFTY.)... Key moments in Bill Gates life (Note: He is "not" one of the seventy-five richest people in human history.)...
There is deliciously interesting biographical information on geniuses such as "ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, THE PHYSICIST WHO FAMOUSLY HEADED THE AMERICAN EFFORT TO DEVELOP THE NUCLEAR BOMB DURING WORLD WAR II. OPPENHEIMER, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, WAS A CHILD WITH A MIND VERY MUCH LIKE CHRIS LANGAN'S (The aforementioned American with a TWO-HUNDRED-IQ.) HIS PARENTS CONSIDERED HIM A GENIUS. ONE OF HIS TEACHERS RECALLED THAT "HE RECEIVED EVERY NEW IDEA AS PERFECTLY BEAUTIFUL." HE WAS DOING LAB EXPERIMENTS IN THE THIRD GRADE AND STUDYING PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY BY THE FIFTH GRADE. WHEN HE WAS NINE, HE ONCE TOLD ONE OF HIS COUSINS, "ASK ME A QUESTION IN LATIN AND I WILL ANSWER YOU IN GREEK." OPPENHEIMER WENT TO HARVARD AND THEN ON TO CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY TO PURSUE A DOCTORATE IN PHYSICS." HE STRUGGLED WITH DEPRESSION HIS ENTIRE LIFE... HE TOOK SOME CHEMICALS FROM THE LABORATORY AND TRIED TO POISON HIS TUTOR."
One very important thing you will learn through these stories of intellect... success... near misses... and what could have been... is that *NO-ONE- EVER-MAKES-IT-ALONE!" This is a non-stop-engrossing well written book. I recommend it highly.
Book Review: Who do you know who has made it on their own? If they have they are a liar!
Summary: 5 Stars
Outliers-The Story of Success. I really enjoy the writings of Malcolm Gladwell. I read this book for the 2nd time, this year and wanted to share it.
So can you really just make it on your own? Malcolm says no!
In Outliers Malcolm goes about and stated that people don't just make it on their own but every single one is reliant upon others. This goes back to to how we are all so dependent upon our groupthink culture and how we are all so interrelated.
The Matthew Effect
So being from Canada I like hockey and the Great One-Wayne Gretzky. Its interesting how he states in the book that the majority of players in the NHL are born earlier in the year due to peewee league age cut off dates. Don't believe me look at page 20. Huh, so when was Wayne Gretzky born-Jan 26, 1961. Gordie Howe-Mar 31, 1928. Bobby Orr-Mar 20, 1948. Interesting and then check out Czech soccer player on page 27 and it starts to make sense. Birth dates do make sense.
The 10,000 Hour Rule
Do you remember Jan 15, 2009? Maybe not, but you you might know the Miracle on the Hudson.
You see no average pilot could have landed that plane safely. Why would I say that? You see Mr Gladwell states in the book that there seems to be a rule that sets the average man apart from the experts, the 10,000 Hour Rule. you see the Beatles got their first gig in Hamburg Germany at a strip club. They said that they played here day and night and before they made their big break for America and playing on the Ed Sullivan Show was appox 7 yrs. and this is of playing almost everyday of their early lives. Bill Gates spent the majority of his early years messing around on computer. He was beginning to write code since he was 13.
All we ever hear about with these people of influence is what they accomplished with their talents, but we never hear about their time spent in development. You see those years are what equate to the 10,000 Hour Rule. This is roughly 10 yrs.
So why did I mention the Miracle on the Hudson? You see Capt "Sulley" Sullenberger was calm, collected and knew what he was doing, why? He had over 25,000 hours of flight.
The Trouble with Geniuses
He also mentions that a person is only so smart to a certain point to where there seems to be the law of diminishing returns on how smart they are. That point is around an IQ of 120, after that it doesn't matter how high you score. He gave the example of the genius of Chris Lanagan and his socially awkwardness and lack of people skills. He may have been a genius but he was no Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer who helped build "The Bomb" was also a genius but had what was called practical intelligence. He tried to poison his teacher and got off by talking his way out of it. How, well he was raised with intellects and around socially susceptible people, not like the farm boy Chris Lanagan was. You might be smart but your background and years of development do count.
Legacy
So does being from the South really make you want to fight more than being from the north? Culture of Honor. Does being a Korean Pilot make you more careless when it comes to flying a plane? When is it okay not to be polite when you are running out of fuel? How does the Geert Hofstede theory size up to other countries to one another? Does it make us weaker or stronger? Does the Asian way of counting numbers make them smarter at math because its quicker? Does working on Rice Paddies really give you a stronger work ethic? Can't you get that from just reading a book? Does the KIPP program really make inner city kids Ivy League contenders? How? And if Aunt Daisy didn't go to the Chinese shop keeper, Mr. Chance, to give her a loan to get off the island of Jamaica to go to school in England would Malcolm Gladwell have been given a chance to come to America and become the great writer that he is?
You see our lives are all full of these interesting questions, but the one thing that is certain that Gladwell makes is that we are not self made, but formed by our surrounding, our ancestry, and practiced trades. We are all dependent upon one another.
Book Review: How to "unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't"
Summary: 5 Stars
In reviews of Malcolm Gladwell's previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, I express an opinion that Gladwell offers an insight that others have previously expressed and then requires 300+ pages to discuss it. His key points in both books could have been made in an article. Gladwell's "tipping point"(2002), for example, is essentially the same as Michael Kami's "trigger point" (1988) and Andrew Gove "inflection point" (1996). (Gladwell does acknowledge the importance of an article, "Broken Windows," co-authored by James Wilson and George Kelling for The Atlantic Monthly in 1982). When I began to read Outliers, therefore, I feared that Gladwell would once again offer a thoughtful but verbose examination of a by-now familiar insight: success requires more than extraordinary talent.
That said, Outliers is (in my opinion) his most significant and most valuable book thus far. As the Epilogue clearly indicates, this is also his most personal book. In it, Gladwell demonstrates superior storyteller skills as he discusses several quite different situations that demonstrate that "the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are...[Those who succeed] owe something to parentage and patronage. [They] may look like they did all by themselves. But in fact 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...It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are [begin italics] from [end italics] that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."
Gladwell provides many different versions of "the story of success" involving those who demonstrate what sociologists call "accumulative advantage." For example, in any youth sports competition (especially hockey) that groups players according to the calendar year of birth, those who are born in January, February, or March are more likely to be bigger, better coordinated, and more talented because of "the phenomenon of relative age." They will play more often, receive more individual attention, and be selected to play on better teams because they were born closest to the cut-off date. Their success follows a predictable course. "Outliers are those who have been given opportunities - and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them." Clearly, Gladwell agrees with Geoff Colvin that "talent is overrated." As does Colvin, he cites The 10,000-Hour Rule and suggests that "once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, [begin italics] much [end italics] harder."
John Maxwell makes the same point in Talent Is Never Enough. If it were, "then the most effective and influential people would always be the most talented ones but that is often not the case...Clearly talent isn't everything." That said, he hastens to add, talent is worthy of our admiration and must be perceived in the proper perspective. Maxwell's key point is that all of us have a choice, actually several choices, and can determine to what extent (if any) we take full advantage of the talents we have, such as they are. "If you do, you will add value to yourself, add value to others, and accomplish much more than you dreamed was possible." Gladwell agrees but would presumably stress, also, the importance of others (family members, teachers, coaches, clergy, patrons, and mentors) to being able to commit 10,000 hours, "the magic number of greatness," to (Colvin's term) "deliberate practice." The success of the various outliers whom Gladwell discusses is not exceptional or mysterious. "It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."
Book Review: Read it, enjoy it , learn from it - but understand its limitation
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell is a wonderfully original writer. His ability to take the academic research of others and translate it into fascinating individual stories , to in doing so create memorable social concepts is one of a kind. Here he examines the stories of people of extraordinary achievement, somewhat like himself. He calls them by the awkward name 'outliers' and compares them to a freezing cold day in August in Paris, something so rare it tempts us to seek explanation for it. In his previous works he had focused more on the individual cases, but here he studies the social background, the historical time, the communal factors which lead to the production of Bill Gates and Bill Joy, to a batch of first - rate hockey players, to top New York proxy lawyers, to super- proficient Asian - mathematics students, to the musical genius, Beatles, to the physics genius,Robert Oppenheimer. He does not isolate any single factor but does focus on the importance of being born at the right time( The special nine years in which a group of superrich American business- people were born, the nineteen- fifties in which the Computer revolution was developing, ) of practicing and working hard ( He uses the Daniel Levitin idea that it takes ten- thousand hours of practice, three hours a day for ten years to become ready). He emphasizes again and again that those born outside the worlds of opportunity, despite their genius and talent simply do not make it.
In a way he provides a recipe which is just right for the time we have entered, a time of great economic crisis, a time after a period of super- individualism in which there is a new need to focus on building social capitol, to providing infrastructure repair. He is really then implicitly providing a kind of message to the new Obama government of the need to shift priorities and invest in creating an America where more will have that opportunity to be the 'outliers' the great innovators and creators of the future.
So this is a timely book, an enjoyable book as all Gladwell's writing is enjoyable.
But that said the fundamental thesis itself is a very narrow and limited one. It is of course necessary to be in the right place at the right time. Periclean Athens is better than Sparta after the Pelopennesian War. Renassiance Italy is certainly better for a plastic artist than let us say eighteenth century Italy. It is also better to work hard than not if one is to refine one's skill. And of course if one has never seen a math book in one's life one will not become a math genius. Still his explanations provide necessary factors but not sufficient or really explanatory ones in regard to genius. After all there are thousands and thousands who are born in the necessary conditions.
Gladwell's formula for success is too narrow. And in fact even within the parameters he chooses it raises question. It is wonderful that Asians who come from a rice- culture can calculate numbers faster and score higher in general in Math, but in fact the great geniuses of Math History to this point do not come from East Asia. One can calculate Mozart's practice - hours and somehow arbitrarily come to ten- thousand. Did Mendelsohn too , who produced some of his greatest works when under twenty also practice just ten- thousand hours?
All in all Gladwell does upon up in an interesting way a whole new face to the discussion of great accomplishment. But the traditional searching at the individual life and genius are still I would bet the most productive ways of understanding why for instance one Newton in 1666 came to make in one annus mirabilis a whole set of fundamentally new understandings of the natural world- and one Einstein in 1905 came to make his own grabbag of fundamental discoveries which transformed the understanding of the natural world.
At the top of the ladder on the highest rung there is only one. And how he got there is his story alone.