Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Can you, too, become a super star?
Summary: 5 Stars
First, full disclosure: I know Malcolm Gladwell. He was a guest speaker in my course "Creativity and Personal Mastery" at Columbia Business School and he held my class spellbound. I LOVE his pieces in the New Yorker and his earlier books.
Gladwell uses the same technique in writing and speeches, and it is a hugely effective technique. He begins by presenting an intriguing fact, a VERY intriguing fact. He then presents a bunch of other, equally riveting, related facts so we now have a very fascinating theme. He then lays out some obvious possible explanations and knocks them down. He follows up by presenting some not-so-obvious-but-still-plausible explanations and knocks them down. And, finally, he presents the "real" reason and bolsters his case. Usually, but not always, this reason seems indisputable when he is done with his explanation.
In Outliers he begins by noting that immigrants from a particular Italian city have remarkably low rates of heart disease. He proposes and knocks down several possible explanations like diet, exercise, genetics etc. before honing in on his explanation and I won't spoil the book for you by giving this away.
I have a Ph.D. in Marketing and spent years as a professional market researcher so I am quite qualified to comment on his assertions. From the standpoint of rigorous experimental design his explanations fall down. There are numerous intervening variables that have not been considered or even identified. Some of the reviews have attacked him on this score. All of them have missed the point.
Gladwell never professes to give you revealed truth. To fault him for this is silly. What he does do, time and again, is to give you a point of view that you had probably never considered. He stretches your mind and gives you the same feeling of awe stout Cortez felt when gazing on the Pacific Ocean for the first time. THAT is the real value of his books. And he has a damnably engaging style of writing.
In Outliers he makes the case that in many fields - ice hockey, computer programming, law, mathematics, business - our traditional notions of inherent talent are flawed. Other explanations, and again I won't give the game away by revealing these, are more powerful and likelier to be "true".
He makes his case so compellingly that you feel amazed that you never thought of it. He would have made a great trial lawyer.
So get this book and enjoy it. Just don't think of it as the ultimate answer for any of the complex issues he considers. Even though non-fiction it is a page turner and there are copious notes at the back for those who wish to explore further.
There are occasional factual errors. For example, he asserts that only Bobby Fischer became a chess grandmaster in less than ten playing years. Sergey Karjakin, Parimarjan Negi and Magnus Carlsen all did it in less time than Fischer and remain the three youngest persons to reach that level. However, such errors are few and in no way detract from his theses.
Book Review: Surfing with Malcom Gladwell
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my first "book report" and the standard spoiler alert is in full effect. I recently read Maclom Gladwell's book Outliers and wanted to talk about it. To start, it was a great book. For those of you that are not familiar with the writings of Malcom Gladwell, he has written two other books of note; The Tipping Point and Blink, which I highly recommend. Gladwell has a way of explaining concepts through story telling and Outliers is no exception.
The focus of this book is what makes people successful. The general assumption is that people succeed due to their innate ability. Gladwell dispels this myth through such concepts as the 10,000 hour rule, the general lack of geniuses ruling the world, the role of legacy and sharing people's stories and their fortuitous timing. (The 10,000 hour rule states that a person has to work at something for 10,000 hours to master it.)
Gladwell's recipe for success (and I'm paraphrasing here) is a combination of:
1. Passion (for some-thing)
2. Hard work
3. and excellent timing.
Intelligence plays a part and yet it's not the key factor as there are many people with extremely high IQs (200!?!?!!) that are not raging success stories. Malcom also discusses creative intelligence, but does not dive very deep.
In the end he concludes that there are no outliers:
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.
As I read this book and all of the circumstances around being successful, the analogy that came to mind is surfing. For those of you that surf (or have tried surfing) you understand what it is to be a grommit; a beginner. You quickly realize that surfing is an amazing skill to attain. (You notice I did not say master since you never really master surfing.) Learning to surf is a humbling experience and I would not be surprised if Kelly Slater fits the 10,000 hour rule.
Surfing is a combination of different skills.
1. You have to be able to "read the swells" to tell where the next set will come in
2. You need to be able to tell where the wave will break relative to the shore
3. You need to be able to position your self in the right spot relative to where the wave is breaking; not to far out and not to close to the shore
4. and until you attain the skill, you need be strong enough to compensate for not having that skill fully defined
Surfing, like Gladwell's examples of successful people, is a combination of having the skill to read the landscape (seascape), being in the right place at the right time (good fortune), having the capability to execute, having spent the time practicing and having the passion to be ride the wave.
Book Review: Well Worth Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Three blocks from our office in Boston is the spot where Benjamin Franklin was born and played as a child. Franklin is the American icon of the Self Made Man we so admire today. His story is that those with ability and willingness to work hard can change the world. Don't be defeated by humble origins, lack of money, or lack of education.
Beyond a threshold of innate ability, hard work may be more important.
Author Malcom Gladwell argues that those who are successful put in at last 10,000 hours of practice into their art or craft. He shows how the 10,000 hour rule applies for Mozart, the Beatles, and Bill Gates.
Gladwell also argues that there is more to success than ability and hard work.
There is cultural heritage. In the case of Jewish and Chinese culture, it has provided a clear advantage in American society.
There are other random factors that contribute to success: what month you were born, what year you were born, whether your parents encouraged you to strive, whether your parents had money, etc.
From a Board of Directors perspective, it should caution those who get involved in CEO and Board selection not to be too infatuated with impressive resumes. And not to overpay someone because he/she was smart enough to be born in a certain year or a certain month.
From a social policy perspective, this book gives hope that perhaps success is not about Great Men and Women. There are positive factors that can be engineered to contribute to success. The KIPP Academy, discussed in the book, for example, takes poor urban children and makes them work as hard as Chinese Rice Farmers---with dramatically positive results.
And those of you whom society regards as "successful," read this book and prepare to feel humbled.
Your success is the gift of cultural legacies you barely comprehend, accidents of birth, and random events you had the good sense to seize on.
One last comment: there is a chapter about Geert Hofstede's research on how culture shapes personality. In particular, there is a full discussion about one dimension called Power Distance. Those cultures with high Power Distance or respect for power tend to have more airline fatalities than cultures with low Power Distance. It is a fascinating discussion. But it also has implications for those of us concerned with quality control and ethics in business. The steps an American CEO of Korean Airlines took to reduce Power Distance within his Korean employees are well worth reading. Companies with operations in different parts of the world will find this chapter of greatest value. What does it have to do with the book's basic theme of success? It really has nothing to do with it. The entire chapter could have been eliminated. We suspect he put it in because he thought it was important.
It is important. Read it.
Larry Stybel & Maryanne Peabody
[...]
Book Review: Letter to the Author
Summary: 5 Stars
Dear Mr. Gladwell,
First of all I would just like to say how phenomenal I found your book. Now that I am in my forth year in the music program, primarily the choral and theatre groups, it is very interesting to see the different levels that my peers are at as far as musical ability is concerned. I've probably practiced for about 1,000 - 1,250 hours throughout my entire high school career, which is where my interest in music began. I still cannot play the piano and don't know what each letter is on the scale but I can follow along, whereas one of my peers who grew up taking piano lessons every single day knows almost as much about theory as my teachers do. I never really reflected on how much importance it was to be raised and be taught a specific subject and I was actually curious, if you were planning of having children and wanted them to major in a particular field, how intensely would you follow the information about how to be successful (as far as practice goes)? Also, after conducting your research do you wish that you had been born at a different time or place and wondered what life would be like had you been successful in a field other than literature?
After reading the chapter, Rice Paddies and Math Tests I started to wonder what would happen if elementary education in the U.S. should incorporate more foreign languages, primarily Mandarin Chinese not only to improve the ability U.S. students can perform math, but also to improve English. I've found after studying four years of Spanish, that when you compare the grammar structure of one language from another, you begin to understand why the languages are constructed. If this started early enough, not only would students better understand grammar concepts but also could incorporate how to count with Asian numbers to get work done at a faster rate.
Throughout your book, you mention that opportunity along with time and place is key to being truly successful. In the chapter Marita's Bargain, do you find believe she was successful not only because of the opportunities at KIPP, but also because of the pressure she was given? I've found in my own experiences that I do best when under pressure, and when I don't have a deadline breathing down my neck I tend to take my time and don't work as diligently as I should. If this is the case, why not add this sense of pressure in education as much as possible, not because stress gets things done, but because it gives people the motivation to want to get things done.
Again I would like to thank you for providing the world with such detailed explanations as to how the most successful people got to where they are today. Hopefully, future generations will read this book and use it to learn how to be as prestigious in whatever field they pursue as you are in literature.
- Chris Shriver
Hatboro - Horsham High School Class of 2011
Book Review: Chalk one up for nurture!
Summary: 5 Stars
Macolm Gladwell offers another expertly-written and thoughtfully-presented argument in 'Outliers', which describes the life paths of many incredibly successful individuals but also makes the case for nurture over nature as a means to that success. In the concise book, Gladwell presents in his Tom Wolfe-esque narrative journalistic style the stories of some of history's greatest musicians (The Beatles), computer whizzes (Bill Joy and Bill Gates), and lawyers (Joe From). His point is that, yes, these greatest of greats had some innate talent to make it as far as they did, but they also had a great deal of luck. For instance, Bill Gates didn't become the wealthiest man in the world by pure ambition and cunning; his wealth was the result of skill in computer programming that sprung from a series of lucky situations. Gates, after all, was one of the only eigth-graders who had unlimited access to a computer in 1968. Gladwell makes a convincing case that much of what we attribute to individual success is really due to happenstance.
Gladwell argues briefly for allowing for the same opportunities for everyone (e.g. having multiple school cohorts for people born at different times of the year), but fails to acknowledge the obvious conclusion that his argument leads to: we are products of nurture much more than nature. In fact, Gladwell allows for much innate talent in his successful subjects throughout the book, but doesn't see that the innate talent may be more of the same nurture that was applied to the subjects before observation. Gladwell produces such a convincing argument for nurture at some point in life--why not apply the same argument for one's entire life?
In addition, Gladwell doesn't really come to a unifying circumstance that helped his subjects get to their outlier success. For example, the author attributes some of his subjects' success to opportunity of wealth (Bill Gates enjoyed a wealthy upbringing that allowed him to work on computers at a young age; children of wealthier parents are brought up with an 'entitlement' mentality that allows them to fare better in the real world) and others to race (From's success was directly related to his Jewish upbringing) and still others to pure luck (the Beatles just happened to get selected to play in Hamburg, which forced them to work hard at their craft). It appears to me that the only thing in common between all of Gladwell's subjects is not a single opportunity that they all had, but that they all took advantage of the opportunities that they had. For instance, Gates's wealth and From's poverty when growing up both were key elements to their success--they just took advantage of their unique situations.
Despite the minor flaws, this book is highly recommended, if nothing else for its ease of read and its thought-provoking ideas.