Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Exposing limits on self-determination and rugged individualism
Summary: 4 Stars
Malcom Gladwell has done an admirable thing with "Outliers," his new book that succeeds his bestsellers "The Tipping Point," and "Blink." No, it isn't the fact that he has given us yet another "ahah" moment of elucidation and tingly cognitive dissonance. Nor is it his significant accomplishment in showing us the limits and vanity of ego, pride, arrogance, shame, or disappointment over our successes and failures in life--at least where we've worked hard and given it our all. His accomplishment, in this reviewer's humble opinion, is even greater. Knowingly or not, Gladwell has illuminated the value of determinism and naturalism in understanding how our world works. If he is right, he has moved us one click along the path to better using this knowledge to improve the quality of life on earth.
Gladwell's central premise is a counterintuitive blast to conventional wisdom: the most important causes of outstanding achievement and/or financial success are not talent, brilliance, or even biological in nature. The most relevant causes are external, circumstantial, and environmental. Let's go ahead for the time being and call it "luck."
Your reaction to this concept might be strongly negative. In some knee-jerk way, mine was too. As a strong advocate for solid scientific methods, my first reaction was to attack his "science," which others have done. More on that in a minute, but the point is that the reaction is presumably normal. In fact, I've now spent years overcoming and writing about my own myopic worldview in favor of rugged individualism, wherein the only excuse for failure is our inability to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, read biographies, and repeat the success of Bill Gates, Bill Joy, John Rockefeller, or Andrew Carnegie. Perhaps if I'd just read a few more books by Steve Jobs or Jack Welch, I would have gotten to the promised land already!
Now before you "stop this madness" by killing the messenger, this may help: Gladwell reinforces the notion that hard work and practice are essential for greatness. To that end, Gladwell says that whether it is becoming a violin virtuoso, an industry titan, or a brilliant writer, there seems to be a magic threshold of around 10,000 hours of diligent effort required to achieve proficiency worthy of such greatness. From Mozart to Tiger Woods, these rules appear immutable. In fact, Gladwell argues that the 10,000-hour rule is more important than superlative talent, brainpower, genetics, or many other factors to which we typically and readily attribute success.
But the crucial point of Gladwell's work surrounds the variables that we choose to ignore in our fiercely capitalistic, individualistic world: namely, all the planets that align to provide you the opportunity to get those 10,000 hours in the first place, to access the knowledge and information. And if you are lucky enough to be in the right place, at the precisely perfect time in human history, you might even become unfathomably wealthy as a super success--an "outlier." If you are born at the wrong time, however, you could at best live a mundane existence grinding it out like the rest of us, or at worst ... well, you know where that goes: wars, genocide, starvation, disease, dark ages, depressions, etc.
Outliers begins with a fascinating and incontrovertible story about the amazing distribution of birthdates among the best junior and professional hockey players in Canada. It turns out that virtually all the great hockey players are born between January and March. Say what? How does that make sense? This is the strictest of meritocracies, and only the best of the best children work their way through the religion that is Canadian hockey. Shouldn't we expect that any child with the talent and will to play the national pastime could make it to the big leagues? Do children born in August not like hockey? Are they just no good at the game for some reason of astrology or something?
In short, Galdwell explains that when kids are young and competing all-out to be noticed, get the ice time, get the best coaches next year, and be promoted to the premier group in the next age range, there exist significant developmental differences due to age. When you were born--and the cutoff age at any given level--is a make-it or break-it variable that skills, genetics, and perseverance can essentially never overcome. The kid who is almost seven, versus the kid who just turned six but is on the same team, is going to be faster, bigger, better developed, and will almost always win out as the preferred choice for promotion to the next winning team. Compound the effect year after year, and only the January through March births ever have a realistic chance of achieving greatness, even though the natural talents and level of commitment of kids born in October could be just as great. We think success is based entirely on merit, but in fact it is not. Other factors apply, such as the month in which you are born.
From here Gladwell moves to Bill Gates and some of the great leaders of the PC revolution. Clearly Bill has relied only on his brains and raw determination, right? Well, Gladwell compellingly shares Bill's unique story, and implies that through interviews Bill has affirmed his agreement with Gladwell's characterizations; Bill Gates was very lucky. Gates had an unfathomably fortuitous break that granted him access to a computer programming terminal at a time when few computer experts in the world had such access. He got 10,000 hours of practice long before even the great computer experts of the day, due to his age, his freedom, and being in the right place at the right time.
Bill Joy had a similar story. He was a major force behind UNIX BSD, did a major rewrite of JAVA, and co-founded Sun Microsystems; a large chunk of his code still runs on Macs today.
Bill Joy went to the University of Michigan to study biology in 1971. Turns out he discovered computers at one of the first universities in the world to abandon the tedious punch card systems in favor of real-time programming terminals. Though time on the terminals was limited, this provided much greater productivity than most programmers in the world could have imagined at that time. More significantly, Joy then accidentally found a glitch when logging onto a terminal--a glitch that gave him unlimited access! He dove deeply into programming, abandoned biology, and had his 10,000 hours of programming experience at a time when he, Gates, and perhaps a handful of people in the world could accumulate such experience. Combined with his generation's unique position in history, when anyone older was entrenched in a mainframe paradigm and anyone younger would be too late to spearhead the computing revolution, and you get a perfect storm of opportunity.
Steve Jobs too, of Apple Computer fame, had unique access to early programming experience. Gladwell even relays the circumstances of some special help for the lad, from none other than Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard fame). Jobs had access to Bill Hewlett?
Importantly, there is also a birth-date coincidence among the Silicon Valley elite, as with the hockey players from Canada. 1955, much like the tipping point of the 1830s--when Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Marshall Field were uniquely positioned for great success during a pivot point of human history--this information revolution was similarly magnificent. To learn more about these punctuated points of innovation, examine the new book by futurist and demographer Harry Dent Jr., "The Great Depression Ahead."The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History. Mr. Dent has been chronicling macroeconomic trends and "tipping points" for some while. While his prognostications have produced expectedly mixed results, the retrospective elements of his work are relevant to Gladwell's arguments.
You get the picture, though Gladwell delves further into fascinating thoroughfares and side roads along the road to the cause-and-effect circumstances behind "outliers"--those unique and extraordinary individuals that lie outside any mathematically definition of "normal." Throughout, the theme is relatively simple: whether examining studies that show IQ and talent don't matter beyond a certain threshold, cultural factors that affect why airplanes crash, influences of skin color on economic circumstances, language differences that make math retention easier in Chinese, or the unique circumstances that catapulted the Beatles to greatness--there are requirements for greatness. These include some minimum level of competence and diligence, and over 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. Still, these requirements alone are nowhere near enough. For every "outlier" there are complex, causal factors that together produce the success effects, and the words "environment" or "luck" come to mind.
Now, is Gladwell writing hard science here? No. Are there leaps and conclusions that often seem to stretch what little evidence is presented? Yes. Could some of his conclusions be off-the-mark non sequiturs? Yes. Still, are there certain concepts and illustrations that make the point while employing empirically testable and seemingly uncontroversial claims? Sure, such as with the birthdates of elite Canadian hockey players. For these reasons, and one more, I highly recommend Gladwell's thought-provoking book, Outliers.
The additional poignancy and relevance of Outliers to my world, to our troubled economic times, to education, to violence, to social problems and to virtually all other questions of public policy, is what is most profound about Gladwell's book. Intended or not, Gladwell makes a brilliant case in support of a naturalistic and deterministic worldview--as the most useful method for improving the human condition. It is a worldview that seeks to learn about how the world really works--not how we want the world to function--through our likes and dislikes, superstitions, or fabled narratives. It is a worldview that sees earthly events as a set of interrelated causes and effects.
Let's face it, most of us can think of few things that cannot be explained, at least in retrospect, as anything other than interactions of natural events. They may be complex, and science may not even understand them yet, but atoms collide, chemicals interact in the brain, and events unfold. Just two broad categories of variables--environment and biology--come together in a complex cause-and-effect process that in retrospect makes events appear almost predictable. Don't jump the gun now; this is not fatalism, or predestination-ism. But just thinking this way can fundamentally change everything.
Does that "loser" who can't seem to replicate Bill Gate's success--despite taking all the risks and working diligently--really deserve our ridicule as a "mental midget." Does better understanding of what got an individual or society to this point in life and time not supplant arrogance, shame, intolerance, and persecution? With better understanding might we be able to help kids born in September to become world-class hockey players, or inner-city youth learn to read? Thanks Malcom, you've given us nutritious food for thought.
by Stephen L. Gibson, author of A Secret of the Universe: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Discovery of an Eternal Truth
Book Review: Not definitive, but definitely thought-provoking
Summary: 3 Stars
As with The Tipping Point and Blink, this third book from Malcolm Gladwell was interesting and thought-provoking. As with his other books, reading it is like reading the opening argument made by one side in a series of debates. It's a great conversation starter, but not a treatise on the topic. It's well-written, with only a few gaffes in grammar and spelling.
This book consists of nine chapters and an epilogue. The first five chapters are in Part One, "Opportunity" and the last five are in Part Two, "Legacy."
If you're familiar with Gladwell's works, you know he writes interesting opinion pieces rather than rigorous works of research. He comes from a newspaper background, so this is to be expected. Most of us enjoy a well-written opinion piece, as long as it's not blatantly insulting to our intelligence (as, for example, the NYT consistently is). Though Gladwell's books aren't serious works of research, they make for enjoyable reading and some intellectual stimulation.
I disagree
Because I happened to read this the year after its release, I glanced at what other reviewers were saying. Are we all talking about the same book?
At one end, there are the worshippers. They proclaim this book offers great insight based on solid research. But the book isn't rigorously researched, doesn't fully develop any of its arguments, and really doesn't offer new insights. It presents some cherry-picked examples and knits them together to form a flimsy framework of some interesting ideas in a fairly preliminary manner. This is what interesting conversationalists do all the time, to start interesting conversations. It does present some meta ideas that you will catch if you are alert enough; more on those, in a bit.
Unfortunately, Gladwell interjects conclusions into his "conversation starter" instead of asking questions. So, he sort of stifles the whole point of the book, if that point is per the above. Gladwell presents his conclusions as fact without the evidence or rigorous examination to do so credibly. That's considered unfair among interesting conversationalists, and it's the kiss of death in a debate.
At the other end, there are the demonizers. They deride this book unfairly and exaggerate its weaknesses while minimizing its strengths and value. One of these reviewers gives the impression that Gladwell did a few Wikipedia searches and not much else and just threw together a poor excuse of a book using fallacies of logic and a very inventive mind. But Gladwell did look at a variety of sources. He just didn't take that far enough to address contrary evidence and defend holes in his theories. It's not a scholarly work, and I think it's important not to grade it as one.
As would be expected, the truth lies between these two extremes. Outlier isn't a terrible book, and it's not a great one. It's between. It's not total fluff, but it's not a serious scholarly work. It's between.
The book lacks rigorous research, so it is not possible to draw supportable conclusions from what Gladwell presented. This doesn't mean his material is completely out in left field; it just means that he hasn't made a solid case for his conclusions. In a peer-reviewed journal, this kind of work would be rejected outright. But this isn't a peer-reviewed journal; it's a book by a person with no experience or formal credentials in the field he's writing about and it needs to be considered in that context. While such books will never be academic references or cultural game changers, they do have their place.
Both the lavishly praising and harshly criticizing reviews struck me as superficial and inaccurate.
Wrong title
The word "outliers" is one that that Gladwell seems to not understand, and which did not make an accurate title for this book. I think the presumptuousness and non-relevance of the title opened the author to the kind of criticism he's drawn.
The subtitle, "The Story of Success" is also inappropriate. My question, "Are we talking about the same book?" also applies to the title and subtitle.
Not all of the anecdotes are about outliers. Perhaps none are. I know this word from its usage in statistical analysis. Really, there is about zero statistical analysis in this book, so the word should not even be used in conjunction with the text.
I'm not a statistician, nor have I played on on TV. But I'm familiar enough with the discipline to know that you need to work from a very large representative sample of the population and use some calculus before you can start talking about what parts of society are in the areas along the edges of the curve. There's not a single differential equation in this book; in the professional journals I regularly read, I might come across a dozen diffiQs in a single article.
It's not "the" story of success; it's "a few stories" of success rather than even a representative sample. Another author could probably write a book of "other" stories of success that aren't congruent with these few.
Practical value: true or false
Despite the above, I believe the points Gladwell makes in this book are worth considering. As a member of Mensa, I know quite a few geniuses (and I are one, too, ha, ha). Gladwell is correct that IQ does not automatically confer success. Anyone can go to Sears and buy a great tool set. But not just anyone can be a great mechanic. A high IQ is like that tool set. How you use it is what matters (with nods to the size doesn't matter folks). But as Gladwell might point out, it helps if your dad run runs the car clinic your grandfather started and you grew up in a town with a couple of racing tracks.
One of his underlying concepts, if I understand him correctly, is that no single personal characteristic automatically confers success. That's not a new or controversial concept. And what about the inverse of that? Even a single great flaw, if one believes Sean Stephenson or Tony Robbins, can't stand in the way of success. Gladwell seems to be saying this, as well.
Some people complained the book has no practical value. Au contraire. Consider how many people berate themselves or have self-esteem problems for not reaching some particular metric of success. To compensate, they do things that unintentionally broadcast their insecurity, for example going deeply into debt to buy a status car instead of a practical one they can afford.
There is an "I'm OK" theme reverberating under the text of this book. And that theme has a counterbalance that is also a theme reverberating under the text of this book. People who pat themselves on the back for their successes without acknowledging other factors besides their own qualities and contributions are delusional. Simple chance plays a great role in how things turn out. This doesn't mean everything is a matter of chance and circumstance, and Gladwell doesn't say it is. But sometimes you can do everything right and not get very far.
The thrust of this book, as I can determine, is this. Successful people become that way by latching onto opportunities and then working hard to take advantage of those opportunities. A corollary is what is not an opportunity for one person is an opportunity for another, due to who they were and where they came from. This doesn't mean using where you came from as an excuse for failure, but matching it with the opportunities that come along and working hard to achieve your goal.
Gladwell's major point (that I see) is a generalization, and it's generally supportable; perhaps you recognize it from Sunday School or from some other childhood training: those who work hard get the rewards, if they work on the things that are right for them and if they seize or make the right opportunities. This is a core concept in our Western civilization, so agreeing with it as Gladwell generally does (he seems to disagree with the "make" part) isn't as loony or absurd as some reviewers would have you believe.
The specifics are a different matter. You can choose to see the forest or just look at the trees in front of you, which gives rise to the observation of strategically blind people, "They can't see the forest for the trees." Gladwell takes a tree approach to describe the forest, and that's where the controversy comes in.
I chose not to get too mired in the weakly presented trees or to argue about whether that forest is the size and composition Gladwell asserts it is. I chose to reflect upon the meta ideas of what Gladwell was saying. That's a powerful takeaway, if you haven't thought about those things for a while. On the particulars, Gladwell may be correct or not but we don't know that from this book because he didn't rigorously defend or even analyze his conclusions on those particulars.
Gladwell's been featured in the business literature, and he is interesting though not definitive. He doesn't have a background that would make him definitive. As with the people in the anecdotes he writes about, he makes the best use of his talents to seize the opportunities presented him. If you haven't yet written three best-sellers and been featured on the cover of Fast Company, perhaps you can learn something from reading this book. Or perhaps not, if you've achieved your personal best in some other way.
Book Review: Gladwellian Prose - Probing or Quoting?
Summary: 1 Stars
With effortless ease, Malcolm Gladwell once again proves he is a master of conceptualizing the abstract, simplifying the complex, and articulating the mundane. Blending together a rich tapestry of scientific literature, illustrative examples, anecdotal accounts, and intuitive observation, Gladwell poses his argument on how the outliers of society - those individual that are distinctly more successful than the norm - are more a result of their sociodemographics, family lineage, and societal evolutions than they are individual capabilities. In short, Gladwell states that pure genetic endowment or aptitude alone is not enough to predict our future, but that culture also plays an undeniable role in steering our course.
While not the most profound notion ever proffered, Gladwell does do an amazing job of attracting a readership to an interesting topic. He has a keen eye for questioning the status quo and helping us realize how much chance and environmental variation go into shaping icons, moguls, and geniuses. Simultaneously, he is a progenitor of ideas and an inventor of expressions. However, much of Malcom's intellectual opportunism relies heavily upon isolated research, broad generalizations, and a nonsensical number of "if, then" contingencies that nearly create a tautological story.
It may truly be that achieving eminence, in the sense of achieving supreme social status or creating a legacy, is the result of a unique set of circumstances that allow one to achieve their full potential. However, at the same time, it is also true that achieving such status is the result of a particular configuration of independent traits all of which have to be present or present in a certain degree to yield the result. Gladwell only manages to dance around both these ideas without producing any sound or substantial evidence as to what makes success, simply only chalking a major influence up to "culture" and "practice." Instead, he cites intelligent studies that are nearly 100 years old (e.g., Terman, 1920), highlights the failure of "one" intellectual genius named Chris Lagan while arbitrarily discussing the success of a wealthy physicist, provides untestable hypotheses about the role of culture in influencing behavior. Combine these disjointed statements together and ... presto, you have Gladwell's selective examples to form a somewhat coherent argument for his notion of the deterministic forces in our lives. It is almost a truism in any science that post hoc theorizing and single cases are an impossible basis for making any kind of argument about causation. Any one of Gladwell's "anecdotes" could be easily accounted for by another alternative explanation.
For instance, Gladwell asserts that a major reason for success is due to practice. He uses the example of Bill Gates, who, being born in 1955, was perfectly situated to embrace and practice the computer during his twenties. He also states, due to cultural differences, that Asian children are statistically better at math than American children due to a practice-orientated attitude. These are sound arguments. One of the main ingredients to learning is practice: this allows time to make errors and correct ourselves while converting learning from short-term memory to long-term memory. Practice also clarifies and strengthens the neural connections that are formed while we confront new and familiar material, thus allowing us to build deeper comprehension and cognitive schemas. Nevertheless, there is much more. Mastering materials requires the appropriate focus and attention of the individual. Bill Gates, Asian children, or any other "anecdote", must be able to remain vigilant and persistent in the material they are pursuing. If one is able to maintain greater attention, they may be able to extract more information at a single time. For example, if any student is to become better at math, they may simply need to place greater care and intention into their actual studies by focusing on what is being said, what they are actually understanding, and what they can actually remember.
In another vein of reasoning, there is much to be said about natural abilities and aptitudes. A higher cognitive ability can, and does, facilitate a greater amount of knowledge acquisition and is highly predictive of future job performance (Hunter & Schmidt, 1998). On a similar note, one can read Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences or Steinberg's triarchic theory of intelligence to see how people may naturally excel in different domains of life, such as musical or interpersonal skills. This would imply that someone like Bill Gates had a predisposition to understanding logical/mathematical concepts, thus providing him a natural advantage in his field. Finally, one might consider research by Csikszentmihalyi (1991, 1996) on creative giants, flow, and experts. People that excel are essentially those with a singular commitment to mastering one domain. These individuals have an "intense curiosity" and find the topic "so absorbing and challenging" that they enter a pure state of engagement known as "flow." In short, one must be intensely passionate, interested, and stimulated by their goals and life aims, not simply a sum of practice hours.
Mr. Gladwell similarly raises the notion that cultural traditions may play a role in plane crashes, that the 1990 crash of Avianca Flight 52 over Long Island might have had something to do with the pilots' being Colombian. Mr. Gladwell argues that the pilots came from a culture with "a deep and abiding respect for authority" -- which suggests that the first officer was reluctant to speak up when the exhausted captain failed to do so, and that both men failed to talk forcefully to the air traffic controllers, who were tough New Yorkers, unaccustomed to the pilots' polite language. Of course, Gladwell, not being a cross-cultural researcher, uses an extreme example without any empirical evidence of his own to rule out other alternatives. For instance, what if the pilots simply had timid or introverted personalities? What if the specific flight school they attended taught them to always listen to the air traffic controllers? Perhaps climate differences between New York and Colombia accounted for the crash, with the pilots not being used to differences in landing conditions? What if it was differences in the family lives of these two specific pilots as opposed to macro-cultural differences (e.g., really strict parents)? What if the pilots are simply responding with anxiety and fear to a novel situation (e.g., being in a new country or having a new job), thus causing them to make mistakes?
Going beyond Gladwell's arguments, materialistic success in life (getting ahead through achieving power, status, or recognition) is at least partially influenced by differences in personality. Those who are dominant, aggressive, ambitious, and entrepreneurial tend to take more risks, be more assertive, be more determined, and take on heavier work load (Hogan, 1996). These individual tend to obsess about making gains and achievements through their life and establishing a prominent career. These individual are "more likely" to work harder and exert greater effort in obtaining their goals. Furthermore, individuals that have higher degrees of self-efficacy or competence in a specific area tend to cope better during setbacks, exert more effort in learning material, and approach novel tasks with enthusiasm.
To conclude, Gladwell once again demonstrates he does a good job of writing a book that captures the imagination and reasoning of many. However, its flaw rests in the lack of critical reasoning, extreme oversimplification, and biased selectivity in finding examples to support his ideas. If you enjoy an intriguing read without a substantial amount of sound scientific theory and evidence, then check out "Outliers." However, if you want to read a more rigorous, stimulating, and substantial piece, please check out Simonton's "Greatness: Who Makes History and Why" - [...]
For additional reads on natural individual differences, please look into William Wright's (1998) "Born That Way" discussing how genetics account for nearly 50 percent of who we are, or Judith Richard Harris's (1998) "Nurture Assumption," contending that the primary source of environmental influence on personality comes from our peer groups. The preponderance of evidence in the behavioral sciences indicate that there is a strong genetic basis for individual differences which interact in unique ways with our environment to determine who we will become.
Book Review: Another Amazing Gladwell Journey
Summary: 5 Stars
Spoiler alert! This book contains about a dozen "whoa, amazing" nuggets that could change your life, or at least tell you why you never changed your life, and I'm going to include all of them here just to have them listed somewhere convenient online for my benefit (and yours). But as any Gladwell fan knows, you don't read his writings just for the "holy cow" moments, you read them for the journey he takes you on in delivering those moments. This work provides several amazing journeys, even as they stray progressively farther from what seems to be the advertised purpose of the book: to illustrate how certain people become phenomenal successes. We learn early on the secret to being a great Canadian hockey player, assuming you are already spectacularly talented and work hard. But eventually we wind up learning not how to become a spectacularly successful airline pilot, but rather a spectacularly bad one. No bother, the book is providing entertaining information that can transform your professional life. So as for those dozen points, here goes, and you've already been warned:
1. There was a town in Pennsylvania called Roseto where people lived far longer and suffered far less from heart disease than people of similar genetic stock, eating similar diets, and living in similar nearby towns. The only explanation researchers could find was that Roseto had a uniquely strong sense of community: family and faith were both strong, and the wealthy did not flaunt their success.
2. In the Canadian "all star" junior hockey league - the surest ticket to the NHL - the majority of the players on the winning team were born in January, February, or March. The league was for players between 17 and 20 years old. Why the month anomaly? Because in Canada, elite hockey teams have try-outs at the age of 10, and the age cut-off is January 1. In essence, the oldest 10 year olds are far better at hockey than the youngest 10 year olds, so the youngest (those born in December) have no chance to make the select teams, which are the only ones with excellent coaching. The pattern continues all the way through high school. Similar birthday patterns are seen in places such as the Czech junior national soccer team. Makes you wonder about what "good for your age" means in academics too.
3. Many researchers believe in the "10,000 hour rule," namely that you need to spend about 10,000 hours on a skill - anything, including music, computer programming, business dealings in the expanding American West, or mergers and acquisitions - in order to become great at it. This is something Bill Gates and the Beatles have in common, thanks largely due to circumstances beyond their control.
4. At least 15 of the wealthiest 75 people in world history (in modern dollars) were born in the 9 years from 1831 to 1840. They were old enough to have learned how to profit in the rapidly industrializing United States (via 10,000 hours of experience) but not so old as to have already settled down and been inflexible with their life options or concepts of business. Similar birthdate "coincidences" are seen among the wealthiest tech entrepreneurs including Bill Gates, and among some of the most successful lawyers in New York.
5. In long-term studies, IQ is found to predict professional success - but only up to a score of about 120, past which additional points don't help. Nobel prize winners are equally likely to have IQs of 130 or 180. When minority students are admitted through affirmative action, their achievement scores may be lower, but as long as they are above the threshold, it does not affect the likelihood of professional success.
6. Anecdotes from the "world's smartest man," (according to IQ tests) Chris Langan, and the children of middle class families, suggest that "practical intelligence" about when, how, and with what words to speak up are a huge factor in success - specifically when speaking up can save you from losing a scholarship. Longitudinal studies of high-IQ children showed that a family's high socioeconomic background was more important to predicting success than very high IQ.
7. Many people put in their 10,000 hours in something like computer programming, but then never find themselves in the midst of a revolution where people with 10,000 hours of experience are desperately needed. Bill Gates did. The connections he formed as an early highly-sought programmer helped him rise and found Microsoft. Joe Flom, one of the most successful lawyers in New York, became a specialist in mergers and acquisitions before such transactions were considered "acceptable" business by mainstream lawyers. When the culture changed in the 1980s to accept such dealings, Joe Flom was the best of the best who had put in his 10,000 hours in a now-mainstream business. He became an historic success almost overnight.
8. When economically tough times hit, people stop having children for fear of being unable to provide for them. However, this may be the best time to have children, because there are few other children competing for things such as classroom attention, spots on school sports teams, professors' attention, and jobs upon high school or college graduation. There are also more children a decade behind them who will provide the demand for the goods and services the older children will provide.
9. The typical airline crash involves seven consecutive human errors, and crashes are significantly more likely to occur when the more-experienced captain is flying the plane, as opposed to the subordinate first officer. The likely reason is that the first officer is much less likely to speak up when he or she notices something wrong or a human error, and the captain is flying the plane. Flights in countries with a large "power distance index," which characterizes cultures where subordinates are generally afraid of expressing disagreement with superiors, are the most likely to crash. This included Korean air, which had the worst safety record among major airlines until it instituted a program requiring subordinates to speak up when there were problems. There are benefits to deferential, polite, and subtle conversation, but they are unlikely to be beneficial in stressful cockpit environments.
10. There are at least two non-genetic reasons Asian people excel at math (and some tests have suggested that Asians may have genetic _disadvantages_ in math). First, most commonly used Asian languages use a monosyllablic, ordered, regular system to describe numbers, unlike English and European languages. This gives young children up to a year's head start in math. Second, math often requires persistence and trial and error, characteristics also needed for successful rice farming, the dominant form of agriculture (and employment) in Asia even in the 20th century. Hilarious evidence of correlation of persistence with high math scores is found in results on the TIMSS, an international math exam. The beginning of the exam includes a tedious 120-question section that asks students about their parents' education, their friends, and their views on math, among other things. It is exhausting, requiring great _persistence_, and some students leave it partially blank. If you rank countries by how many of the survey questions their students completed, and by the TIMMS score, the lists are "exactly the same." Holy cow! At the tops of both lists were Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Japan.
11. Students from middle class and poor neighborhoods show an achievement gap in reading that widens over the years of elementary school. However, the financially poorer students progress (in terms of grades on standardized tests) the _same_ amount during the _academic_ year as the wealthier students. It is during the _summer_ break that better-off students with better-educated families continue to read and learn, while the less well-off students likely do not, and show major declines in autumn test scores compared to the previous spring. Students in "KIPP" (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools showed major success despite coming from low income neighborhoods, because of a much longer school day and academic year.
12. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, tells a story in the final chapter about how his family, and thus he, benefitted from light skin tones and changing racial attitudes in Jamaica. It's a stretch compared to the rest of the book, but gets you thinking and is an awkwardly charming read.
Book Review: Liars, outliers, and out and out liars
Summary: 2 Stars
And then there's just plain exaggeration to tell a good story and court the intellectual fashions of the day, which are Gladwell's faults. He goes to interesting sources such as Geert Hofstede's Cultures and Organizations, biographies out of Silicon Valley, or Richard Flynn's work on intelligence, or the remarkable KIPP schools, and takes highly selected and anecdotal evidence to tell amazing yarns and breathe new life into hopes for equality which have remained unfilled for decades.
He argues by anecdote to have you believe that almost all success is due to incredibly hard work. The argument has some substance - an awful lot of success is attributable to tremendously hard work - but it also involves native ability, a fact which Gladwell would wish away. He totally, seemingly wilfully overlooks evidence that doesn't go his way, rather like Stephen Jay Gould a quarter century ago.
He tells us about the 10,000 hour rule for expertise. This theory, which arose in the field of psychology during the 1990s, holds that it takes 10,000 hours of experience to become a bona fide expert. Common sense tells you, but Gladwell does not, that this is a kind of rule of thumb. Also it is a continuum. If you were to listen to a violinist after 9000 hours of practice, and then again after 11,000 hours, the differences would be subtle. Moreover, there are some domains, such as music and certain realms of the law, in which common sense would tell you that practice will lead to this kind of expertise and others where it will not, such as mathematics and theoretical physics. I would recommend that any of Gladwell's readers Google this theory and decide for themselves how applicable it is.
His examples include Bill Gates and Bill Joy working incredibly hard at developing their programming expertise, which Gladwell concludes put them in a position to build Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. He also talks about lawyer Joe Flom of Skadden Arps. Well and good. Gladwell would have you believe that the patterns in coincidences he sees are absolutely compelling. They are interesting, but they are not the whole story. He doesn't tell you what an absolute dilettante Larry Ellison of Oracle was, how he basically wasted his life until he was about 30 doing whatever he pleased. It doesn't tell you about Pierre Omidyar of eBay who had his genius idea, started a company, gave it to a competent manager in Meg Whitman, and stepped back to enjoy it. It doesn't offer a theory about polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Poincare, Swedenborg and others who made contributions to so many fields that they could not have possibly invested 10,000 hours in becoming expert in all of them. He overlooks the fact that Gates' genius was in business even more than programming. The 10,000 hour theory doesn't offer an explanation for math and theoretical physics geniuses whose insights typically start coming to them before the age of 20. In other words, it is interesting but limited. Gladwell doesn't tell you that.
One of Gladwell's major, consistent, beat you over the head themes is that intelligence is not a deciding factor. In making this claim he says that Einstein's IQ was only 150. Excuse me? You don't have to be Einstein to know that's probably wrong. I went to school with kids that smart, and let me tell you, they were no Einsteins. Einstein never took an IQ test, but every Internet source which offered a guess put it in the realm of 160 or above. Gladwell also declines to mention the measured and reported IQs of guys like Warren Buffett, Gates, Joy and Myhrvold, which are astronomical. Instead, he says that anything over maybe 140 is wasted. Absolutely untrue. Being majorly smart is a major advantage in life. Who woudda thunk?
He drags out one certifiable genius who is not a resounding success to make the fairly obvious point that genius isn't everything. He overlooked a second - the Unabomber. These are anecdotes. Gladwell loves anecdotes almost to the exclusion of boring stuff such as statistical justifications.
In another bit of dubious fun with numbers, he lists the 75 richest people of all times, with John D Rockefeller heading the list. Certainly he has experts to cite for this, but even a casual reader will have to concede that an attempt to compare the monetary wealth of Bill Gates and Cleopatra requires a few, ahem, simplifying assumptions. Wealth can be measured a vast number of ways, among them spendable money, real estate, ownership of production, ownership of people, or the ability to direct human labor. Cleopatra didn't exactly spend US dollars circa 2010. In any case, when he discovers that almost 20 percent of his list were born within a nine year period around 1840, you can come to one of two conclusions. Gladwell concludes it is an amazing coincidence. I would suggest maybe it is an amazing list. I will not claim that there is no substance to his argument, but as always, Gladwell is a little bit too breathless, and the list is more than a little bit contrived.
Gladwell argues that vast success is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, which certainly does not hurt, but it is not as decisive as he would have you believe. Every age has produced new opportunities, and people who were conspicuously successful in exploiting those opportunities. No mention of Sergei Brin, Andy Grove, Henry J. Kaiser or others whose success doesn't precisely fit his parameters.
He is a supporter of the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, as am I. Teaching every child to the extent of his abilities is a great idea. KIPP kids are overwhelmingly from the most disadvantaged sectors of society. Just learning to show up in school, do your work, and be a responsible employee is a tremendous step forward. Gladwell reports that 90% of KIPP alumni go to college, a remarkable number and worth reporting. He is quiet about what happens next, and Googling "KIPP alumni" doesn't reveal any overwhelming successes, despite the fact that the program is approaching 20 years of existence. If most of the kids have jobs, it is a tremendous success. If nobody has started the next Facebook, well, it was an extreme uphill battle even with sponsorship.
Gladwell is a popular writer because he tells the kind of myths that our popular culture wants to believe. He would have us accept that Asians are not as smart as they appear, and ghetto kids are a lot smarter than you would believe. He asks us to think that the things that set them apart are largely cultural. He makes a huge deal out of the difference between wet rice farming and any other way of making a living off the land, then draws major conclusions about the Chinese. Rice farming has made Chinese what they are. What about Indians, Thais, Viets, Indians, Filipinos and others who practice this agrarian art? Didn't work the same for them. Not a mention...
I would advocate that anybody reading this book also go to Gladwell's primary sources. Take a look at "Cultures and Organizations," and perhaps my Amazon review of it which calls into question the strength of the conclusions which the authors draw on the basis of their statistical factor analysis. Read Anders Ericcson's many publications on the 10,000 hours to expertise theory. Take a look at Flynn's work on intelligence, and that of Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn, all three of whom speak highly of each other's work, and whom I have reviewed, and see if you conclude that measured intelligence is unimportant in individuals and/or groups. Examine the statistical analysis performed specifically to control for cultural factors, such as studies of identical twins raised in vastly different cultural settings.
My conclusion is that in almost every case there is some substance to Gladwell's happy tales, but in general they are vastly overstated. He is a good craftsman with a gift for saying what people want to hear. I am sure he will always be successful, and probably continue to be influential beyond the merit of his work. As Gladwell himself would tell you, some people have the good fortune to be born in the right time and place. This is an era that favors diversity, and he is its prophet.