A Review Of Outliers

There are two main reasons why I may take longer than one might expect to get through a particular book: either it's just not holding my interest all that well, or it's so darn good that I don't want to finish it too quickly. Outliers (The Story of Success), by Malcolm Gladwell, fits squarely into that second category!

As with his earlier works, Blink and The Tipping Point, Gladwell starts with a specific perspective and then spends a few hundred pages winning you over to it (or not, I suppose). Here his premise centers around those individuals who excel in their chosen areas of expertise (the outliers) as he attempts to discern what they might all have in common (the story of their successes). As he says early on in the book, "we assume that it is... personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top." In other words, those we recognize as the best - whether it be in sports, arts, business or just life in general - must surely have gotten there based solely on their own unique attributes, right? Outliers may just cause you to adjust that viewpoint.

In the first half of the book, entitled "Opportunity", the author presents several striking examples of seemingly-egalitarian setups - meritocracies, we'd all say - which actually provided significant advantages to those who would eventually rise to the top. For Canadian readers, it may come as quite the revelation to discover just how much importance birth-month plays in the lives of hockey players at every level. (Gladwell grew up in this neck of the woods, by the way. So it's not entirely shocking that he'd have some insight, as well as potentially interest, in the sport.) No one gets to the top of the Canadian hockey heap unless they have oodles of talent and drive, to be sure. But they also don't get there, it turns out, without a few legs up along the way. In the case of young hockey players in Canada, for example, that comes in the form of being born early in the calendar year and therefore having a size advantage over those even just a few months younger (thanks to the rules of entry into hockey leagues for kids). It's a small difference at that age, but the advantages that it provides - selection to elite leagues, admission to special programs - compound as the years roll on by. Soon the cream of the early-year-babies are playing twice as many hours per week as the ones not quite so lucky in when they were born, and that widens the talent gap over time.

That notion of hours per week of practice making a difference is another key point of Outliers. Gladwell's research uncovers the "10,000 hour rule" demonstrating itself in such diverse fields as computer programming, piano mastery and even rock music, in addition to the aforementioned sport of hockey. In one of the more surprising outcomes, the author claims that not only do top-notch performers pretty much universally put in somewhere near 10,000 hours of practice while honing their craft, but also virtually none of those who come up short have, in fact, put forth a comparable effort. What that distinction speaks to, however, is once again opportunity. Could Bill Gates ever have started up Microsoft or Bill Joy have co-founded Sun Microsystems or re-written much of the Unix operating system, Gladwell asks, if each hadn't been fortunate enough to gain unprecedented access to state of the art (not to mention prohibitively expensive) computer technology during their teenage years? The magic formula that shows up again and again in Outliers seems to be:

Natural Talent + Dedication + Opportunity = Success

And if even one of the factors on the left is missing, the author argues, you get something less than success on the right.

The second half of the book is called "Legacy" and talks more about cultural advantages and disadvantages that come into the picture. Asian students do better at math for various reasons having little to do with innate intelligence, for example. Numbers are understood at a younger age in the Orient, thanks to languages that obfuscate them less than English tends to do. Gladwell makes an argument against summer vacation for students - much to the horror of any North American teenager who might happen upon the book, I'm sure! - by showing just how much damage is done to the young minds' progression over those summer months. Ironically, it's the children from the poorest background who suffer the most because of this, as their summers off are even less likely to provide any stimulation in comparison to their better-off classmates. And both groups fall further and further back of their Chinese and Japanese counterparts, for whom school is more of a year-round activity.

I've barely skimmed the surface of the topics covered in this book, in what I hope is a whetting of appetites. I found it fascinating, from start to finish, and look forward to discovering whatever Mr Gladwell may turn his attention toward next.