Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: You are who you are based on factors beyond your immediate control...
Summary: 5 Stars
In the blogging circles I follow, it's been nearly impossible to miss the frequent mentions of the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I requested a review copy of the book, as I'm not sure I'd get through our library hold list for the next six months given the popularity of the book. I'm glad I made the effort to get a copy, as Outliers does an excellent job in destroying the common myths of what it takes to be successful.
Contents:
Introduction - The Roseto Mystery
Part 1 - Opportunity: The Matthew Effect; The 10000-Hour Rule; The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1; The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2; The Three Lessons of Joe Flom
Part 2 - Legacy: Harlan, Kentucky; The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes; Rice Paddies and Math Tests; Marita's Bargain; A Jamaican Story
Notes; Acknowledgments; Index
The first example of "success" involves a sport I know and love... junior hockey. It's generally thought that at the Junior A level (just short of professional), the stars are ones that have worked harder and have more skills than others who haven't made it to this level. But after looking at player statistics, Gladwell noticed something interesting. Nearly all the players have birthdays in the January/February range. Coincidence? Not really... It turns out that January is the age cutoff for players. Players born in January are the oldest of their class year. They are bigger than other kids in the same year. At the age of five, those five to eight months of difference creates a significant edge. The January players get noticed, and get more attention than others. This attention leads to more opportunities, which makes them better, which gives them more opportunities, etc. The kids born towards the end of the class year don't end up with the same advantages as they're smaller. The net result is that these Junior A stars may think that they've achieved this level through pure skill, but the real answer is that they've achieved quite a lot simply by being born in January...
Gladwell uses this insight to dig into other success stories and general assumptions (such as all Asians being good at math). In all the cases, he found solid evidence to point to other external factors that gave these people and groups an edge beyond "hard work". The Asian/math phenomenon can be tied back to language that enables young children to understand math concepts much more easily than does English. Korea Air plane crashes were not due to Koreans being bad pilots. It was tied to a culture of deference that kept crew members from openly questioning the captain, thereby forcing communication to follow a ritualized pattern to avoid offense. Once you're made aware that the "lone wolf" pattern is rarely a complete story, Gladwell's findings cause a lot of things to fall into place when it comes to achievement. Basically, you are who you are because of those who came before you.
I really enjoyed this book. I've often thought there had to be more behind the "self-made man" stories, and Gladwell confirms it. That's not to say that someone can't overcome the odds, that they can't be born in December and become a hockey all-star. But it forces you to look behind the obvious feel-good stories to find other answers. Even if you don't agree with the conclusions that Gladwell reaches, you'll be forced to think. A recommended read...
Book Review: Macolm Gladwell, the outlier
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Few have the ability to translate complex ideas into something readable. Even fewer have the ability to do it well. Gladwell is one of those rarities.
Outliers: The Story of Success is Gladwell's latest and arguably his best. In Outliers, Gladwell takes a look at select anecdotes of what makes for success. An interesting conundrum is that Outliers is potentially a misnomer. It should really be called Success: The Story of Outliers.
Why? Statistically speaking, outliers are data that skew curves - they reside outside the normal bell curve which makes them special, and at times, a thorn in the side of researchers. Throw out an outlier and you might be labeled unethical. Keep it in, and your data may not accurately portray normal distributions.
Yet outliers are perfectly normal and to be expected. In essence, they are the aberrant data points, like rolling double sixes six times in a row with a pair of dice, which, while rare, will happen eventually - a bit like why so-called "cancer clusters" are more likely explained as statistically abnormalities than for alleged environmental causes. A more thorough look at outliers as phenomena is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which looks at the effects in life of outliers.
What Gladwell does is look at select outliers as personalities, such as Bill Gates, the Beatles, Jewish lawyers in New York and so on. His questions are: What makes them special, different and successful? In this way, his book is more about what makes for success rather than what makes for an outlier.
Nevertheless, Gladwell's points remain. If you've read the rather cheesy book, The Luck Factor: The Four Essential Principles by Richard Wiseman, it's as if Gladwell found a parallel track with Wiseman. Success, they both say, relates to circumstance, perseverance and, perhaps most importantly, seizing opportunities which may not appear as opportunities at the time they are presented. (Wiseman tells you why you should always take opportunities presented if you want to be more successful in life.)
Is it really that simple? Not really. It's actually far more enigmatic, and Gladwell as expected treats the subject with a great deal of thought. He concludes with this:
"Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success 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."
Gladwell is always a recommended read. His evaluations and conclusions of collections of attractive anecdotes in Outliers may be shocking to some - why a generation of Jewish lawyers in New York are so successful, why the month you were born may determine your success as a hockey player -- yet his treatment is always given considerable thought, which helps to put himself at the top of best-seller charts. Concluding with a chapter on his family history is particularly fitting considering Gladwell himself is an outlier.
Book Review: Outliers: made not born
Summary: 5 Stars
The basic premise of the book is that statistical outliers have as much to do with forces outside of a person--upbringing, historical context, incidental opportunities, cultural forces, and even seemingly trivial things like your birth month.
Chapter 7
Gladwell examines the case study of Korean Air, which in the 1990s, became a statistical outlier for the rate at which planes would crash. In fact, the rate was seventeen times higher than the typical American carrier. He explores different factors that may have contributed to the aberration, and eventually hones in on one particular cultural legacy that had to be addressed before the ship could be righted.
The dynamic between pilots, first officers, and engineers is typically one of strong communication and accountability. Each must be ready to speak up and take control of any given situation. But in a culture with a high "Power Distance Index" like Korea (Gladwell explains Power Distance Index as "attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority"), it becomes that much harder for an apparent subordinate to speak-up to a superior. Commands are often mitigated to suggestions or implications.
Gladwell is deferential of Korean as a language: "There is something beautiful in the subtlety of the exchange, in the attention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other." But in the context of an airplane cock-pit where hundreds of lives are in the balance, and the difference between life and death can be a matter of seconds, this type of intricate dance can have deadly results. Only when Korean Air addressed these issues, and empowered its officers and engineers to take control did the situation turn around.
Chapter 9
In another case study, Gladwell examines the difference in math scores across income-demographics in standardized testing. Numbers suggested that upper or middle-class homes performed better overtime as they progressed in years. But on rehashing the numbers, the author points out that the greatest differential in scores happened in the jump from June scores to September scores, while the differences in the jump in scores from September to June were minimal across the board.
Based on that, it seemed that those that came from middle or high-class homes gained in advantage over the summer months, while they were taking lessons and in academies. The implication is that the money allocated to education reform during the school year (better teachers, technology, classroom size, and so on) might be better allocated if they went to assisting students who did not have enrichment opportunities during those traditional vacation months. And more fundamentally, Gladwell questions the wisdom of instituting a three-month hiatus from studies, while international students and high-income students were hard at work getting ahead of those that were resting.
Conclusion
Outliers is an enjoyable ride. You're at the mercy of the author's research and genius as he jumps from case study to case study in seemingly unrelated categories. But he does a great job of connecting the dots and giving the reader a clearer picture of how statistical outliers are made, so often by forces outside of themselves.
Book Review: Letter to the Author
Summary: 5 Stars
Dear Mr. Gladwell,
I am a high school student and for an assignment our class was required to read your book and apply it to our essential questions. These essential questions are, "How does time and place affect who a person is?" In your book you address what make one successful, or an outlier. You say that success is not derived from simply the deeds of one person, but it is derived from the people around them and the opportunities they are presented with. This coincides with our essential question. Time and place are the basis of opportunity, and for most of the stories, time was a large factor in the origins of their success. You also presented place as being key when addressing success. In other cases place was the most important factor in whether or not someone was successful.
While reading your novel, although I enjoyed all chapters and their ability to show stories of success, I really connected to chapters three and four in addition to the epilogue. In chapter 3 you reference the real problem with genius' and their success. Within the chapter you say that even the smartest of people are not necessarily successful, and I totally agree with that concept. Time and place are KEY to success and that even the most "gifted" of people cannot go anywhere in life without others and opportunity. A question I still had after the reading was, how much would you say that natural gifts do affect success? In chapter four you continue with your topic of the flawed idea of genius and the false idea of instant success. You brought up the idea of psychological development and socioeconomic status as very important in success as opposed to raw talent, in this case intelligence. I found this chapter very interesting and I agree with it on the basis that I study psychology and I can definitely see the correlation. A question I had after the reading was, is this idea found cross culturally or is just an American thing? Finally, I loved the epilogue. This helped wrap up the entire novel with a short conclusion, and I agreed with all of your point s in it as well. You finished the book with the story of your ancestors and how you derived your success from them. This was a great way to end the book, and add your own experiences to strengthen your argument. My question after this chapter is, is the perception of success vital in seeing where your's originates?
Finally, I would like to finish by apply this novel to my own life. During the whole novel you describe what really makes success as opposed from what people believe. One of those concepts was time and how practice and experience makes success. I can see this idea clearly in my life. A close friend of mine came down with Lyme disease when he was in his early teens and was bed ridden for several months. During this time he had time to research and work on computers and learn more about them. By the time he was better he was leaps and bounds above everyone else in his field because he had the opportunity to practice. This book opened my eyes passed our society's preconceived notions about success and how it is really derived. This realization will not only help me understand the success of others, but also how to create success for myself.
~A. Channing
Book Review: The anatomy of success
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell has produced another brilliant thought provoking book. Would we expect anything less from this author? This book follows in the tradition of his other works changing how we look at a topic forever. This time it is success. Why do some people go on to incredible success while the majority just get by. The answers will change forever your thoughts on how you see success and what causes it. The book shows literally how in so many regards the rich get richer and the poor get poorer due to opportunities, parental engagement and environment. It is profoundly reflected in Canada in hockey. Most of the hockey rosters show that half of the teams players are born in January to March. How could this be? Their leagues start in January, so kids born in January are a full year older than the kids that were born in December and just turned the right age to start the season. These larger children end up getting all the attention and training and go on to be all stars. The book explains this phenomenon in detail.
Contrary to common belief being born with a natural ability is almost unheard of. The truth is the truly successful and world class business people, athletes, and musicians have put in at least ten thousand hours of practice before they have achieved a high level of mastery in their chosen field. I see this to be true in the lives of Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Mozart, the Beatles, and many more. Tiger Woods a natural? Then why has he practiced golf since he was 3? Why did Michael Jordan get cut from his high school basketball team before he become more discipline in his game. Mozart did not create masterpiece symphonies until he had his ten thousand hours in. The book explains the success of the Beatles and Mozart through this principle. You will see like I did how the ten thousand hour rule exists in your own life with high performers in your chosen field.
The author also shows the importance of birth date in success. If you had any chance of being an industrial powerhouse then you had to be born around 1835 in the United States for you to be the right age to take advantage of the time in history, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and fourteen others were all born with four years of this date and the seventeen of them rank in the top 75 wealthiest people to ever live. You had to be born very close to 1955 and have access to a computer before everyone else did, if you were to become a software titan. Bill Gates was born in 1955, Paul Allen 1953, and Steve Jobs 1955.
I love the way the author brought these and many more principles together to truly explain the real anatomy of success. It takes more than just a strong will, outliers benefited from their environment, relationships, country, circumstances, passions, work ethic, and opportunities unique to them. For most of them it took all of the above to be such giants of their time.
"[Outliers]... are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success 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".