Book report: Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Okay, I'm officially a Malcolm Gladwell fanboy. I read and loved "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". First off, he has brilliantly clever ideas. Then, he does an amazing amount of research of all kinds to delve into unexpected aspects of these ideas. Finally, he writes so clearly and beautifully about each of these topics that it's a pleasure to read.
For example, "Outliers" starts with a fascinating presentation of the immigration of poor peasants from a small Italian village to a town in Pennsylvania. His storytelling is wonderful, but then he provides an unexpected puzzle: in this little town, heart disease is practically unknown. How can this be? His examination – and elimination – of all the obvious possibilities introduces the main theme of "Outliers": the reasons behind success.
In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies far beyond most of the other data points. In the world of people, an outlier is someone set apart from the crowd. In Gladwell's book, such outliers include The Beatles in popular music, Bill Gates and Bill Joy in computers, J. Robert Oppenheimer in physics, and lots of Canadian boys in hockey. Why do people like these succeed so dramatically while others do not?
His answers are surprising. It's not – or not solely – because of innate ability. He gives several examples of people with tremendous innate ability who went nowhere. Part of success is hard work and preparation. He reveals an astonishing similarity among successful people that is starting to become known as the law of 10,000 hours. It seems that very successful people have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice in their area of expertise. The Beatles played 8-hour shifts every day for months in Hamburg, Germany. Bill Gates and Bill Joy fooled around with computers – before computers were readily available to everyone – obsessively. The elite classical musicians all put in at least this much time to achieve success.
Another factor is timing, especially when you're born. I'll let you read the details, but it's an amazing fact that most of the best Canadian hockey players – who are among the best in the world – are born in January, February, and March. Why would this be? The top computer entrepreneurs were born around 1955. The top New York lawyers were born in the 1930s (and were Jewish). The wealthiest people of the 1800s were all born in the 1830s. There are reasons for all of these apparent coincidences, but the point is that timing is very important to success.
So is place of birth and cultural heritage. What do modern Asian scores in mathematics have to do with rice cultivation? What does the pattern of crime in the American south have to do with sheepherding in Scotland and Ireland? How did Korean Air Lines go from being one of the most dangerous airlines to one of the safest? Yes, and why does that little town in Pennsylvania have almost no heart disease? All of these strange connections have to do with the unseen advantages that certain cultures – and certain histories – give to some people.
Ultimately, the book asks a simple question: given what we now know about how success happens, how can we help it happen more? Instead of one supremely talented Bill Gates, why not a million? Instead of Asians showing such math prowess, why not all kids? If we can learn to see beyond the myth of the self-made success, we can start to recognize the factors that we can encourage, so that many more – maybe everyone – can be "outliers".
Highly recommended
Okay, I'm officially a Malcolm Gladwell fanboy. I read and loved "Blink" and "The Tipping Point". First off, he has brilliantly clever ideas. Then, he does an amazing amount of research of all kinds to delve into unexpected aspects of these ideas. Finally, he writes so clearly and beautifully about each of these topics that it's a pleasure to read.
For example, "Outliers" starts with a fascinating presentation of the immigration of poor peasants from a small Italian village to a town in Pennsylvania. His storytelling is wonderful, but then he provides an unexpected puzzle: in this little town, heart disease is practically unknown. How can this be? His examination – and elimination – of all the obvious possibilities introduces the main theme of "Outliers": the reasons behind success.
In statistics, an outlier is a data point that lies far beyond most of the other data points. In the world of people, an outlier is someone set apart from the crowd. In Gladwell's book, such outliers include The Beatles in popular music, Bill Gates and Bill Joy in computers, J. Robert Oppenheimer in physics, and lots of Canadian boys in hockey. Why do people like these succeed so dramatically while others do not?
His answers are surprising. It's not – or not solely – because of innate ability. He gives several examples of people with tremendous innate ability who went nowhere. Part of success is hard work and preparation. He reveals an astonishing similarity among successful people that is starting to become known as the law of 10,000 hours. It seems that very successful people have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice in their area of expertise. The Beatles played 8-hour shifts every day for months in Hamburg, Germany. Bill Gates and Bill Joy fooled around with computers – before computers were readily available to everyone – obsessively. The elite classical musicians all put in at least this much time to achieve success.
Another factor is timing, especially when you're born. I'll let you read the details, but it's an amazing fact that most of the best Canadian hockey players – who are among the best in the world – are born in January, February, and March. Why would this be? The top computer entrepreneurs were born around 1955. The top New York lawyers were born in the 1930s (and were Jewish). The wealthiest people of the 1800s were all born in the 1830s. There are reasons for all of these apparent coincidences, but the point is that timing is very important to success.
So is place of birth and cultural heritage. What do modern Asian scores in mathematics have to do with rice cultivation? What does the pattern of crime in the American south have to do with sheepherding in Scotland and Ireland? How did Korean Air Lines go from being one of the most dangerous airlines to one of the safest? Yes, and why does that little town in Pennsylvania have almost no heart disease? All of these strange connections have to do with the unseen advantages that certain cultures – and certain histories – give to some people.
Ultimately, the book asks a simple question: given what we now know about how success happens, how can we help it happen more? Instead of one supremely talented Bill Gates, why not a million? Instead of Asians showing such math prowess, why not all kids? If we can learn to see beyond the myth of the self-made success, we can start to recognize the factors that we can encourage, so that many more – maybe everyone – can be "outliers".
Highly recommended
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