Book Reviews
Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell examines patterns in the lives of extraordinary achievers.
By Heller McAlpin | November 17, 2008 edition
Malcolm Gladwell is an outlier – someone whose achievements fall outside the boundaries of the norm.
He is an extraordinarily successful author and public speaker who has made a name for himself by making people think about the world a little differently with his unconventional, counterintuitive takes on research in the social sciences.
In “The Tipping Point” (2000), Gladwell explored how social epidemics work – what makes an idea or trend take hold – while in “Blink” (2005) his focus was on snap decisions, “the power of thinking without thinking.”
In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell presents some surprising observations about factors he believes separate hyper-achievers from the rest of us.
Like most highly successful people, Gladwell is skilled, talented, and driven. His particular gift is the ability to see common social phenomena from an unexpected angle and to convey his insights in enormously engaging anecdotes and analysis.
But, according to the argument he makes in “Outliers,” these personal traits only go so far in explaining his impressive achievements.
Successful people, he avows, are “beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up…. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”
Put differently, “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’ ”
One such advantage is the luck of a propitious birthday – being born at the right time. Gladwell notes the preponderance of winter birthdays in the Canadian Hockey League. That’s because the cutoff date for peewee hockey is Jan. 1.
A similar skew occurs in American baseball: Because the Little League cutoff date is July 31, more major leaguers are born in August than any other month. With young boys, a few months can make an enormous difference in size and development – so the rosters are filled with older, bigger kids, “confusing maturity with ability.”
These players get more practice, widening their advantage over those who don’t make the first cut. Gladwell rues the wasted talent that could be tapped if there were a pee-wee league for each half of the year.
Year of birth can be even more important. Examining a list of the 75 richest people in the history of the world, Gladwell notes that “an astonishing 14 are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-19th century.”
Why? Because “In the 1860s and 1870s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history” with the emergence of Wall Street and expansion of railroads. People such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan were the right age to take advantage of this transformation.
Similarly, Gladwell considers the outsized success of Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and Steve Jobs – all born in 1954 and 1955, ripe for “the dawn of the personal computer age” in 1975.
Of course birthdays don’t tell the whole story.
Bill Gates, for example, had the advantage of unlimited access to a computer at his affluent private school starting in 1968, when he was in eighth grade. By the time he graduated, he had logged far more time programming than the 10,000 hours that Gladwell flags as the threshold that separates true experts from mere adepts in most fields.
“Outliers” is a how-they-succeeded rather than a how-to-succeed manual.
Gladwell’s arguments aren’t airtight. His theories raise chicken-and-egg questions about which came first, talent or opportunity, and don’t explain why some people take full advantage of opportunities while others do not.
By downplaying the importance of ability or merit in favor of cultural influences, Gladwell not only cheats successful people of full credit for their focus and drive, but, perhaps comfortingly, absolves individuals of some of the responsibility for their failures.
Thought-provoking, entertaining, and irresistibly debatable, “Outliers” offers lively stories about an unexpected range of exceptional people – Korean airline pilots, New York litigators, immigrant garment workers, Asian math whizzes, low-achievers with high IQs, and, for good measure, Gladwell’s Jamaican grandmother.
Overall, it’s another winner from this agile social observer.
Heller McAlpin, a freelance critic in New York, is a frequent Monitor contributor.
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Comments
2. rafee arain | 11.19.08
Extraordinary success comes to ‘them’ naturally. They don’t have to
struggle for it.Historically ordinary people have achieved
extraordinarily.One cannot plan for becoming extra -ordinary.
3. kmw | 11.20.08
Opportunities? The trick I would think is recognizing them, they don’t blink or scream usually, they are diamonds in the rough. You have to believe in, commit to, and work with them before rewards come.
5. Ben R | 11.23.08
I think Dan Seligman’s book “A Question of Intelligence” does a better job explaining the performance of East Asians on math/science subjects. Essentially, if you look at the group average, they do particularly well on the non-verbal component of psychometric tests. This is consistent with their performance on math/science subjects. Seligman also notes possible explanations of this including:
“Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile “selection pressure” for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn’s 1987 paper refers to “the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain.” These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world’s best visuospatial abilities.”
6. kmw | 12.01.08
IMHO, Gladwell is more like a Coelacanth for his industry in “sensationalist, infotainment, give-anyone-ADD-and-depression” times than an “outlier”. I don’t know how he’s perceived in other countries, I’m in the US.(FYI-Coelacanth are fish that were thought to be long extinct, but in fact, are not.)
7. pympau | 12.08.08
While there is no denial that visio-spatial abilities influence the innate ability to grasp mathematical languages, these are extremely variable even amongst an ethnically homogeneous population. Futhermore, adapted teaching methods are very effective at compensating for them, as was demonstrated for example by computer-assisted techniques designed to help female students overcome 3-D visualization issues.
I have worked extensively with Asian students throughout my career, Indian and Chinese in particular, and I have not been able to nail their particular performance on specific innate visio-spatial abilities. What I have noticed however, is how their specific cultures influence what they are interested in focussing on.
To make a long story short, most Chinese students were firm believers in
Edison`s theory “5% inspiration, 95% perspiration”. More often than not, this attitude would be the key explanation for their success. Indian students on the other hand, were more inclined to believe that five minutes of sheer brilliance could compensate for all the rest: this typically made them more creative, but also less predictable. In the end I believe there were no challenge both could not have mastered, it was just how willing they were to put their mind to it - a direct consequence of how important they thought the underlying attitude was for their success.
Now obviously, I am not talking about an “average” crowd here.
8. Todd Crawford | 12.15.08
I want to start off with the fact that I normally don’t read books at all unless I have too…..They tend to be narrow minded, someone else’s biased idea or image of a topic, or just obtuse in nature…. Most of all I just lose interest because I would like to do something physically stimulating. This past weekend while reading the sports page of my local paper my wife came home and said she had a book for my father and asked me to take a look to see if he would enjoy reading it……I couldn’t put it down! I read it from cover to cover and only stopped to try the method of math students from Asia are taught…. Maybe the critics are just set in their ways or Malcolm Gladwell is just a pusillanimous from small remote town on the Canadian Frontier. I think it was refreshing to say the least and worth a read for people who are open to new things…..like reading a book once in a while.
9. Fernando Barcena | 12.26.08
Actually the reason that Asian country students perform better at math is that the curriculum for 4th grade students in these countries include being taught in some fashion the math concept that the Identity Rule is the CORE MATH CONCEPT. This understanding is why they perform so well as a group in math. The argument that the asian languages create some intellectual advantage does not explain why other non-asian speaking countries also perform at high levels. Those countries that understand the importance of the Identity Rule refer to it as The Golden Rule of Math.
Any person with good math skills knows the Identity Rule. What appears to be less obvious to educators in the U.S. (based on U.S. student math performance) is that the IDENTITY RULE is the CORE MATH CONCEPT, and that it can be easily taught. My contention is that these concepts can be understood by a student within an hour to an hour and a half, and that once understood (the Gestalt) by the student, the student can then easily understand all subsequent math instruction, without any further tutoring. An understanding of how to use the Identity Rule to manipulate fractions gives the student the ability to perform in math in the 98th percentiles, throughout elementary and high school just like students in asian countries.
Some additional thoughts on the argument that the asian languages create some intellectual advantage to perform better at math. This argument does not explain cause. It is merely an observation after the fact. The same is true about after the fact observations that differences in socio-economics, race, gender, intelligence, environment, single families, nutrition, homogeneous groups, etc., etc., explain why some perform better at math than others. These variables are not causal either. They make for good reading, but do not explain causality.
I argue that the obviously causal variable is BORDERS. Within some borders/(countries) the school systems include in the curriculum, teaching their students in some fashion, the CORE MATH CONCEPT, the Identity Rule, and how to use the Identity Rule to manipulate fractions. After the 4th grade, all math involves manipulating fractions. Students that are taught this CORE MATH CONCEPT easily, (I emphasize), EASILY, learn all subsequent math instruction. The result then is that in spite of differences within BORDERS of differences in socio-economics, family structure, gender, etc. their students as a group excel at math
Contact me for free 2 page tutorial on how to use the Identity Rule to manipulate fractions.
f.barcena35@comcast
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1. JZy | 11.18.08
Malcolm Gladwell himself says he is not an outlier. Outliers are not completely responsible for their own success; they have had lucky breaks - a victim of circumstance that allowed them to flourish beyond the norm.
See the Colbert Report interview on Monday 11/17/08.