Outliers

Note to self: Trust Malcolm Gladwell. I liked Blink, I liked The Tipping Point, but when he came out with Outliers a couple years ago, I didn’t bother. I don’t think I even read the jacket blurb; I just thought, “I don’t care about success stories of the rich and famous.” I don’t read celebrity gossip. I don’t read executive autobiographies. I’m not interested in hearing about what an awesome guy Bill Gates is. So I was kinda disappointed that Gladwell had fallen into writing that sort of crap.

So yeah, I was totally wrong. It’s not about successful people themselves; it’s about the environments that produce them. It’s not just superstars and billionaires. He takes “successful” to mean “good at what you do,” whether that’s running a business, playing an instrument, or whatever. The normal success story is all about how smart and hard-working the individual is, how unique they are. Gladwell turns that on its head, and instead looks at their families, communities and culture, how they’re a product of circumstances. And most importantly, he looks at how we can change those circumstances for more people, to give them the opportunity to be successful.

I’m going to try to sum up the main points of the book here, as much to help me wrap my head around it - and remember it - as anything. It’s well worth reading yourself. The writing is engaging, and there are a lot of interesting details I’m going to have to leave out here.

If you look at people who are successful at something, whether it’s music or software, they’ve put a lot of time into it. No two ways about it. A study of classical musicians found that you just don’t get good without a lot of practice; there are no “naturals.” The Beatles owed their “overnight success” to the ridiculous amount of live performance time they racked up in their “Hamburg years”, at one point playing five hours a night, seven nights a week.

You only need to be smart or talented enough. A study of people with super-genius IQs found that they didn’t really have any more success in life than other people from similar backgrounds. Nobel laureates come from good colleges, but not necessarily great ones. Ivy league schools make a much smaller showing on that list than you’d expect. The University of Michigan law school found that their affirmative action students - those they’d “lowered the bar” for - did just as well in later life as the rest. Their test scores and grades weren’t as good, but they were good enough. It’s been suggested that Harvard would do as well to pick its students by lottery from all those who make the cut.

Given “smart enough,” opportunities make the difference. Bill Gates and a lot of the other big successes in the software business had unusual opportunities to learn programming at a time when most people didn’t have access to computers at all. That in turn gave them the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the personal computer revolution. They had to work hard to take advantage of those opportunities, but they also had to be born in the right place at the right time, and have the social connections, to get them in the first place.

To be willing to work hard, you have to be in a culture that values it, and believe that it will actually do you some good. If your parents are professionals, business owners, or even skilled laborers, you grow up with daily lessons that hard work pays off, that education and training pay off. A study of elementary school kids in Baltimore showed that standardized test scores for all children improved by about the same amount during the school year, but upper-class kids improved a lot more over summer vacation. They were just putting in more time. By extension, it’s not hard to see why, in international math tests, American students come in behind the Japanese, who don’t have a summer vacation at all.

It’s critical to recognize that culture is just a starting bias; you aren’t doomed by your birth. If you let poor kids go to summer school, as one school in New York City shows, they’ll catch up. You can surround them with a peer group that values hard work. We need to acknowledge the role of social connections and support, and reach out to those without them. Otherwise, we’re letting a lot of talent go to waste.