Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Outliers is Outstanding
Summary: 5 Stars
Before reading Outliers, I would have said, "Malcolm Gladwell is a literary genius." Now I have to take it down a notch and acknowledge that Gladwell is a hard-working and somewhat lucky person who took full advantage of the opportunities afforded him by his upbringing and environment. Between The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, Gladwell has created a trilogy of stimulating and thought-provoking works that shine light on otherwise unexplored ways our world develops its people.
Outliers is a nine chapter piece that builds a case for how "Outliers" (people who seem to live outside everyday experience) truly develop. Common wisdom says geniuses are born that way. Gladwell debunks that myth, with a mixture of serious studies and anecdotal stories to balance our understanding that "It takes a village," to raise an extraordinary person.
The Introduction, "The Roseto Mystery," and the Epilogue, "A Jamaican Story," are as compelling as the actual chapters. From the city of Roseto, Pennsylvania, we learn that longevity of life need not be solely a factor of good genes or good health, but also good community. From the Jamaican story we learn that Gladwell himself is a product of a wonderful set of divine circumstances.
Chapter one, "Opportunity," builds the case that early advantages (such as being born January 1 and playing a sport whose cutoff date enables you to be oldest in your league) accumulate and often build on one another over time. Accumulate enough advantages and you've got an outlier.
Chapter two, "The 10,000 Hour Rule," points towards the secret of success for anyone who is willing to work hard enough. Investing 10,000 hours in something you're good at will make you an extraordinary talent. Few people will work that hard on any one sport, hobby, instrument, or discipline. If they do, they almost invariably succeed. In my mind, The 10,000 Hour Rule is so profound that it ought to be classed with other universal numbers like Pi, Planck's Constant, and Avogadro's Number.
Chapter three, "The Trouble with Geniuses," demonstrates that it takes more than pure smarts to become a success. Chapter four, "The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2," fills in the missing piece: brains plus people-skills learned from our home environment is the winning combination.
Chapter five, "The Three Lessons of Joe Flom," observes that being born in the right place, at the right time, to the right family system is a key component in developing as an outlier. Chapter six, "Harlan, Kentucky," begins a new thread that points towards "the village" aspect of personal development. That is, the culture we are born into has a huge imprint on our temperament and outlook, whether we realize it or not.
Chapter seven, "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes," introduces a very interesting theory on cultures and their "Power-Distance Indexes." (America is the lowest Power-Distance culture, which explains in part our straight-forward communication and problem-solving patterns.) Chapter eight, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests," argues convincingly that people who work hard year round in meaningful labor, have a far greater likelihood of success than slouches who take the summer off. The chapter also explains from a purely linguistic standpoint, why Cantonese-speakers find math easier and more fun than English-speakers do. Chapter nine, "Marita's Bargain,: points to some solutions for leveling the field of opportunity and producing higher percentages of outliers.
Every time I read a Malcolm Gladwell book, I feel better informed and better equipped to understand and interface with the world. It's like I have been given a privileged glimpse into the inner workings of human life. Everyone ought to have that privilege, which is why I recommend this book.
Book Review: Finding New Pattersn in Familiar Things
Summary: 5 Stars
The thing that I love most about the writing of Malcolm Gladwell is that he enables me to see familiar things in new ways. For that reason, he is one of three writers of "business books" whose works I frequently re-read. The two other writers are Jim Collins ("Good to Great") and Seth Godin ("Tribes," "Purple Cow," etc.) As a result of reading "The Tipping Point," I no longer look at familiar objects in the same way - graffiti, subway turnstiles, broken windows. In the same vein, after reading "Blink," when I attend an orchestra concert, I wonder about the process of auditioning prospective musicians behind a curtain to prohibit the jury from being swayed by gender prejudice.
Gladwell's latest offering, "Outliers," raises the curtain and reveals hidden patterns in such diverse realms as math learning, blood feuds in Appalachia and plane crashes. It is a fascinating study into the hidden factors - often cultural and anthropological in nature - that explain extraordinary levels of success. In the most simple form, Gladwell's premise - beautifully told in gripping vignettes and mini-biographies - is that hard work is necessary for success - but more is required. He makes a compelling case by finding the same pattern of cultural antecedents occurring in widely disparate enterprises and parts of the world.
Early in the book, Gladwell talks about the rare longevity and health of the inhabitants of tiny Roseto, Pennsylvania.
"Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and family were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health." (Pages 10-11)
And Gladwell succeeds spectacularly in his mission to illuminate the topic of success. Later in the book, as he addresses the patterns of connectivity that have led to the spectacular success of some Jewish lawyers in New York City, he identifies the recipe that makes work satisfying for an individual:
"Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us. . . Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning" (Pages 149-150)
This book has great practical value. The cultural component of the communication patterns learned from studying the cockpit recording from plane crashes impacts the way in which one should communicate cross-culturally in a business setting. I am rushing to write this review this morning so that I can race to the airport to hand my copy of the book off to a friend as he prepares to head to Nicaragua for a business trip. I want him to have the advantage of Gladwell's insights before opening his mouth in his first meeting in Managua tomorrow morning.
I am rushing to Logan Airport; I encourage you to rush to a bookstore or an on-line book source and pick up Gladwell's landmark work Outliers.
Enjoy!
Al
Book Review: You will truly not want to put it down once you begin reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcom Gladwell is rapidly becoming one of my favorite
authors . . . his brilliant first book, THE TIPPING POINT, was
followed-up with an equally compelling second effort, BLINK . . . and
his most recent effort, OUTLIERS, is perhaps his
best to date.
Subtitled THE STORY OF SUCCESS, it gets you thinking
from the very beginning about why some people succeed
far more than others . . . for example, I never imagined
that when you were born could affect whether you'd be
a success in sports or even in school . . . but as the author notes:
* Hockey and soccer are just games, of course, involving a select few.
But these exact same biases also show up in areas of much more
consequences, like education. Parents with a child born at the end
of the calendar often think about holding their child back before the
start of kindergarten: it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child
born many months earlier. But most parents, one suspects, think that
whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually
goes away. But it doesn't. It's just like hockey. The small initial
advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child
born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns
of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and
discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.
Gladwell then goes on to dissect the greatness of pro athletes
and entertainers, explaining that while it is important to have
natural ability, much hard work is every bit as important:
* The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960
and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more
hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third
trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 171 hours on stage. The last two
Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962, involved another 90
hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over
a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in
fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you
know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don't perform twelve
hundred in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things
that set the Beatles apart.
And when it comes to success in mathematics, Gladwell contends that
we need to revisit out entire thinking about schooling in America:
* Suddenly the causes of Asian math superiority become even more obvious.
Students in Asian schools don't have long summer vacations. Why would
they? Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before
dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight
months off in the summer. The school year in the United States is, on average,
180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese
school year is 243 days long.
Space prevents me from listing many other fascinating examples
of success cited in OUTLIERS . . . however, if you're always wondered
how Bill Gates became as wealthy as he is . . . or why certain airplanes
crash more than others . . . then this is the book for you.
You will truly not want to put it down once you begin reading . . . in
addition, after you read it, you'll find yourself discussing Gladwell's
ideas (as I have been doing) for quite some time.
Book Review: Fascinating. This is Malcolm Gladwell at his best.
Summary: 5 Stars
Very "rarely" we come across books that we would like to finish in one sitting. But as the word "rare" explains, when it happens, it is statistically an "outlier".
I was attracted to buy this book on two counts. Firstly, Gladwell's earlier books have been superb. In addition the word "outlier" itself is one that has puzzled me as a student of Statistics, in which I always felt that the subject is missing a great deal of information in what it tends to ignore and discard during analysis. My firm belief has been that outliers are not to be discarded but to be analyzed in greater detail, perhaps to explain the main phenomena. Having said this, I could find neither the time nor the right opportunity to analyze and research into situations where data outliers are taken seriously.
Welcome aboard the yet another masterpiece from Malcolm Gladwell.
The selection process of young boys in Canadian boy's hockey team ensures that boys born in January, February and March have a significant advantage over their younger competitors born later in the year, since a few months in age make a (statistically and actual) significant difference in performance in the game at school. Those who excel in Hockey thereafter are because they were born earlier in the first place. True talent is relegated to frustration and oblivion, at least 70 % of the population, statistically speaking.
Look at the great divide in attitudes between the Northern and Southern states of USA. (as explained by the author). Those in the South have developed a "Culture of Honor" and are easily irritable by simple taunts. Their ancestors' have predominantly lived in mountainous regions as shepherds, constantly guarding their cattle from being stolen and had to develop and sustain a belligerent attitude of aggression against possible intruders and thieves. The Northerners on the other hand had ample agricultural land which required patience to till and grow and cooperation to cultivate that they had a very different way of looking at life. They even tend to ignore and laugh at irritants that can make the southerner burst into anger.
(Perhaps this calls for a theory termed "directional attitude")
The well known "Hofstede's dimensions" are used extensively especially in management education across multinational companies to sensitize executives with transnational assignments. In this book, Gladwell describes "power distance" to explain air crashes. Pilots in "high power distance" countries use "mitigated speech", whereby the junior pilots never challenge even a sleeping commander on his bad flight decisions, ultimately crashing the aircraft with the crew and its passengers. Statistically, an air crash is an "outlier". The truth lies else where. I learnt from this book that it requires more effort to crash a passenger aircraft than to fly it!
One more great analysis is the relationship between working in rice fields and proficiency in mathematics. Rice is the most difficult crop to grow and it requires hard work and diligence. "No one who can rise before dawn 360 days in a year fails to make his family rich". This explains the Chinese excelling in mathematics in American schools. Mr. Gladwell, please include the children from India as well in your next edition for this coveted acclaim.
Gladwell's personal account of how he himself is an "outlier" or a person to excel is a fitting finale of this outstanding work.
Superb in analysis, excellent in content and coherent in logic, this is a book that none can afford to miss.
A well deserved five star rating without any hesitation.
Book Review: Another terrific book from Gladwell
Summary: 5 Stars
"Outliers", like other Gladwell books, is very enjoyable. It offers some interesting perspectives about what makes some people more successful than others, with particular emphasis on those who far exceed expectations. Many of the book's criticisms focus on what the book is not. I think that is a mistake. This is simply a fine book, a very thoughtful and easy read. The book goes into how one's ethnic roots and specific opportunities set the stage for dramatic success, then working hard takes over. For example:
1. An ancestral emphasis on community involvement can lead to health results which beat the odds.
2. The date of one's birth can affect athletic and academic success, as the oldest in a group of youth, will lead to the 'Matthew Effect', better coaching/teaching, more games/practice, etc. There is an accumulative advantage. On a list of the wealthiest people of all-time, besides opportunity showing up with so many from America, among that group, being born around 1835 and around 1955 stand out, to take advantage of when railroads and Wall Street emerged and when computer time-sharing emerged, respectively.
3. The 10,000 hour rule. Gladwell thinks about 10,000 hours of concentrating at a skill is necessary to excel at something.
4. Whether it is height in basketball or IQ, just being tall enough or intelligent enough is all that really matters, same with colleges as long as they are good enough. Practical intelligence, knowledge and savvy are what really counts and family background is the key to having those. Parents should be involved with their children, with lots of negotiating and expectations of child talk-back, necessary to cause a child to develop a sense of entitlement, maybe not the most moral approach, but extreme success madates that.
5. Jewish immigrants had advantage of occupational skills, like in the garment industry - enterpreneurial skills versus other immigrants like peasant farmers. Work was more meaningful. Their offspring saw this, plus NYC public schools were probably the best in the world at the time.
6. Harlan, Kentucky is an example of herdsmen settlers, with a culture of honor from Scotch-Irish ancestors, influenced descendants, Gladwell saying that crime in the South more influenced more by personal than economic reasons. Certain 'insult' words have bigger effect.
7. Plane crashes are more from human errors in teamwork and communication. Cultural respect for authority a big factor; can keep a subordinate from directing a superior in an emergency. Plus, 'mitigated speech' can be a problem. Can be remedied by training in 'Aviation English'.
8. Asians being better in Math, likely related to ancestral tradition of rice paddies, which are complicated and require hard work throughout the year. Western farming is more mechanical with usually an off-season with little work. Here again, more meaningful and hard work. Plus, Asians learn to count faster because of language differences for numbers.
9. K.I.P.P. Academy in the Bronx, charter middle school, is successful because it has long school days and short summer vacations, with students who commit to work hard. Studies have shown schools generally do well when they are in session, the problem are kids losing ground without good parental involvement during summer vacation. So, it is possible to make up for poor childhood family situations. Makes school meaningful. Incentives, rewards, fun and discipline is the formula.
A terrific book.