Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Aviation errors stopped me cold.
Summary: 2 Stars
I was happily reading along until I got to the Korean Air crash in Guam and that stopped me cold. As a former USAF aircraft commander and Airline Transport rated pilot and instrument instructor, I was shocked as Gladwell essentially attributes the crash to subordinate communication hesitancy born of Korean culture.
Gladwell takes his authority from "an NTSB [crash investigation] black-box expert, a PhD psychologist" Brenner who was on the investigation team. He apparently is not a pilot (p. 210 - some are engineers, some pilots, but some psychologists). Brenner describes a 'difficult' VOR/DME approach at Guam which he calls "a pain in the a$$, complicated and takes a lot of coordination". He goes on to say that the airliner was cleared for that approach, that is the VOR/DME approach because the glideslope was not working. Then he quotes the Captain as simply saying "We're doing a visual approach". Gladwell chimes in at this point (p.211) with a glaringly inaccurate description of a VOR beacon. Brenner is back with "if you follow the VOR down, it takes you directly into the hill".
Let me rebut the last paragraph: VOR/DME approaches are not difficult to an experienced instrument pilot. Solo pilots do them often. That's one. And in point of fact, the VOR/DME approach was not cleared by anyone (two). Another approach was planned and flown (ILS - localizer only)/DME. Subtle but big difference. The Captain's briefing was not the one sentence as Gladwell leads you to believe: It was the first sentence in a larger briefing. (three). VOR's do not lead you down into the ground (four). Not even VOR/DMEs.
From here Gladwell launches into a series of descriptions of Korean etiquette and partly attributes the crash to "one of the most critical moments of the flight": passing references to the rain by the copilot: "don't you think it rains more in this area?" [this sentence was uttered a full 18 minutes before the crash]. And anyone who has ever flown into Guam will tell you. Yes it does rain alot. Further, Gladwell extends the copilots comment to 'mean': "Captain. You have committed us to visual approach with no backup plan, and the weather outside is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain and the glide slope is down". Not a single phrase (except the last) rings true. The backup plan was use of the charts (see later) - "What if we don't?" Is Gladwell saying that the copilot just got out of high school? "It's pitch-black outside?" No it isn't, they can see the island lights, stars are out. "Pouring rain?" Please. No experienced pilot thinks or talks like this.
None of this sat well with me, so I decided to read the accident report itself (dutifully recorded in the book endnotes). These reports, by the way, are exhaustive and issued with finality a year or so after the actual crash. They are very interesting reading (for pilots anyway) and are completely accessible online. If your eyes are glazed over at this point, all you have to know is that accident report did not agree with the book's 'expert' description nor did it come close to verifying Gladwell's guesses.
What the report says (in contradiction) is:
1) The Captain briefed a visual approach but added the navigation radio setup (ILS Primary in #1, VOR in #2) which extended the briefing considerably. He also had in front of him the instrument approach charts for the airport. He had been briefed by his company on the dangers of the fatal hill; he had flown there a month before as Captain in the 747 and had flown 7 times before as a 727 Captain. The briefing included general visual profile altitudes. This was 30 minutes before the crash.
2) They tracked the rain squalls on radar and were aware of them and went around some rain clouds on the way in. They did fly into rain before the crash (the sound recorder could hear the wipers come on after the Captain commanded them on).
3) The aircraft was "cleared for ILS [localizer] approach. Not VOR/DME. There is not much difference here between the two as far as a pilot is concerned, but the accident report clearly and unequivocally states the type of approach they were cleared for. If an 'expert' gets even one major detail wrong it throws off the credibility - but here we're talking several incorrect details.
4) The Captain (who was flying the airplane) thought for a while the glideslope was working (it was not) but when he realized it was not [it might have looked like it was] he clearly said out loud that he should not fly below 1440 feet - which is exactly what the ILS approach chart specified. If he had done what he just said, they would have glided over the hill with 800 feet to spare. In fact, he did not level off at 1440 feet as he should have - the flight recorder clearly shows this. He kept descending until it was too late. And no one called him on it - and not because they were deferential Koreans, but because they were not paying attention. The co-pilot and engineer (still running the before landing checklist) were not involved in the approach. In fact the Captain insisted they look outside for the runway. Standard procedure, but still the copilot should at least be monitoring the aircraft position to confirm compliance. The fact remains, the Captain flew the airplane into the hill, accidentally, but he was in full control of the aircraft at the time. Well, unless he was asleep - a possibility that the accident report does not address.
5) A man happened to be on the ground on that hill as the airplane passed very low directly over him and crashed a second later. His comment? "The stars were out" It was perfectly clear, no rain.
The point of all this is that for me, the book's factual and logical conclusions are suspect. I know this one section was mostly bogus since it talked about things I know about. It's a shame because the writing is fun and the subject interesting.
Book Review: A well-reasoned introduction to a complex issue.
Summary: 4 Stars
So called "success-literature" is typically infested with charlatans, but Gladwell has produced an outstanding contribution to the general understanding of this subject with "Outliers". As there are already a plethora of reviews that cater to the this-is-kind-of-what's-in-the-book readers, i'm going to focus more on some of the philosophical irks and pleasures i received from reading this great book.
Gladwell, with understandable vagueness, posits that to build a better world we "need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success". He essentially says that by removing such arbitrariness we might get "twice as many hockey stars" (or whatever the career may be). This of course is a logical error. The NHL, for instance, has finite spaces to fill. A "flowering of talent" achieved through a more efficient scouting system would not all of a sudden give us more hockey stars but it would however raise the level of the ones that were ultimately produced.
And this is the main criticism I have with his theory. There isn't enough on the competition factor intrinsic to human endeavor. If there were a million kids just like Bill Gates with the type of unique access to a computer that he had in 1968, would we have a million Microsofts? Of course not. We would definitely have had greater competition, but in the end, we would most likely be left with at most a handful of surviving companies. The quality of those companies however, all else being equal, would be of sterling standard and have excellent software due to the competition just mentioned. Just like the effect on a pro hockey league it wouldn't mean that the final sample size would be boosted significantly, it would just mean that the quality of that final sample would be greatly increased due to the increased competition during the preceding stages. The old adage still holds true: We can't all be rock stars. Much like an ecology, there is a self-enforcing balance that prohibits over-exploitation in narrow niches of work and life.
Gladwell concludes by saying that if this or that chance had been extended to others (rather than being arbitrary) how many more would not have a better life?
More, but probably not as many as Gladwell thinks.
If opportunity is made universal, it ceases to be opportunity. Opportunity intrinsically means having the possibility to seize an advantage of some sort. Crucially, a lot of these outlier advantages are not about getting broad universal advantages that everyone in the sample gets, they are about getting advantages over your immediate surroundings in order to get ahead of them. In other words, opportunity is often competitive in nature because it typically depends on position from where you are most likely to get in touch with further opportunities.
With the now staggering amount of people in most societies in the world, this social climbing has become less about climbing over obstacles in front of abundance and more about making sure it's you rather than the next guy who gets subjected to the few but golden opportunities that exist. It's true that success isn't necessarily a zero sum game, but positions of influence can be. Consequently, maneuvering into a favorable position from where you are most likely to come in the way of opportunity will always matter. Getting into these most serendipitous positions will invariably have a competitive game theory aspect to it. It's basically hierarchy management. Nobody successful has become so without having some break or skill in their management of existing hierarchies. Nobody has truly been completely on the outside, trying to punch their way in, and succeeded wildly without being given some form of break outside their control. It just goes to show the importance of the advantages you are given, how they matter in trying to reach the position from which you can take a stab at the big time, provided you come sufficiently prepared.
And regarding that last remark i do come to agreement with Gladwell as he explains, in wonderful writing, just how important such "breaks" can be. Unlike Gladwell however, I am less convinced of the possibility for meaningful predictability in this area.
In the grander scheme of things regarding success, we have less control than we would like to think, but at least we have some control. If this book teaches us anything it is to know how much lies outside our hands but to prepare ourselves dutifully for those windows of opportunity that arise once or a few times during a lifetime, often having an extremely disproportionate role in our overall success.
The stars and the Bill Gates' of the world are the ones for whom things have lined up incredibly well. For the vast,vast majority however, life is not like that. It is a rough and tumble existence of varying doses of luck and unluck, of opportunity taken and opportunity missed. Very few have the luck, the background, the IQ, the practical intelligence, the support network, the surrounding environment and the timing to make it to wild and complete success without anyone of them proving to be a devastating snag on the way.
Also, one might add, none of those reaching wild success knew exactly what they were doing either. Bill Gates was just a kid who knew he liked computers. Jerry Seinfeld just knew he liked comedy and wanted to do it as much as possible. It just so happens that the surrounding environment and their timing was perfect and the world asked for their services in a big way. I'm sure somewhere there was a kid with a similar passion for toasters who didn't make any millions despite him spending ten thousand hours fiddling with them.
It's not to the individual's credit when the stars line up in the best possible way and neither should one ever expect them to do so. It is rather, most appropriately, to be regarded as a gift.
And on that last note, I once again agree with Gladwell.
Book Review: Like peanut butter, but spread too thin, with a dollop of wishful thinking thrown in
Summary: 3 Stars
Much in the book to like. Makes you think about success in a different light. Emphasizes the virtue of hard work, while acknowledging the role that luck and opportunities play. However much to argue against also. Some arguments are not carried over to any logical conclusion. Some premises are just not backed by research worth mentioning. Too light on reasoning and too heavy on anecdotes in places. Starts off strong but tapers off midway. The premise and promise of the book is not matched by the content. Like peanut butter spread too thin on a sandwich. Like eating daal (lentils) with too much gravy and too little daal.
This book describes the secrets, so to say, of outliers, i.e. people who are far removed from the average, focusing on those who are far above the average, not those far below. The secrets, as it turns out, are mundane, nor involve disclosure of any top secret rites of passage or initiation into cults, but much that is quotidian. Like hard work. Over several years. Like opportunities. Like being in the right place at the right time, or being born in the right place at the right time. Like having rich parents. And so on.
Why three out of five stars? After all, there is a lot that is going for the book. The writing is very engaging, the topic is very important, the anecdotes grab your attention, the style keeps the reader going, and the length is short.
Well - firstly, the book is short. Too short to be really effective. For such a topic. It is like a Reader's Digest condensed version, except it does not really feel condensed.
Two, no topic is covered in any sort of depth. Feels shallow. There are so many aspects in every topic covered that are left unsaid, uncovered. Like how the brain develops, how different cognitive abilities are affected by what we do, how we live. What role does family play - in providing psychological support. Or how multi-lingualism affects ability. And so on...
Three, the anecdotes are entertaining and illuminating at first. But towards the middle and thereafter they become too detailed and too numerous, to the point of suffocating the narrative, and drowning the author's message out.
Four, what Gladwell posits when attempting to use cultural dimensions to explain mathematical skills and aptitude is just lame.
This book is good, but could have been a lot better.
*** "People don't rise from nothing. We owe something to parentage and patronage. ... The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievements in ways we cannot begin to imagine. ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't." [page 19]
*** "It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. ... Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulated advantage". " [page 30]
*** "Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent plays and the bigger the role preparation seems to play." [page 38]
*** "In Ericsson's study they found that he and his colleagues couldn't find any 'naturals', musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. ... And what's more, the people at the very top don't work harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder." [page 39]
*** "By the time Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past ten thousand hours. "I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events." "[pages 54, 55]
*** "But there's a catch. The relationship between success and IQ works only up to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage." [page 79]
*** "If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things - things that have nothing to do with intelligence - must start to matter more." [page 86]
But what is this?? You're not alone if you cringe reading this:
*** "The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system...
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children." [page 229]
Like much of academia in the 1980s and 1990s, Gladwell himself falls prey to this seductive appeal of over-simplification in thinking that Asian prowess in mathematics, Japanese or Chinese, is attributable to Asian linguistics. The link between agrarian traditions and math skills is tenuous at best, and wholly hallucinatory at worst.
*** "Summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates. It is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life...." [page 255]
*** "The wealthiest kids come back in September and their reading scores have jumped over 15 points. the poorest kids come back from the holidays and their reading scores have dropped almost 4 points. Poor kids may out-learn rich kids during the school year. But during the summer, they fall far behind." [page258]
*** "Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it." [page259]
Book Review: This Book Could Fix American Education
Summary: 5 Stars
Rarely does a book require immediate action from the reader. "The Rights of Man" by Thomas Paine moved America's founder's to action. "The Communist Manifesto" moved Vladimir Lenin to enslave a nation--and allowed Stalin to enslave many more. "The Origin of Species" launched a crusade against tradition that grows in intensity with each subsequent generation. (Listverse has a list of the 10 most influential books of all time, admittedly subjective.)
I Can't Believe It's Not a Novel
Malcolm Gladwell might have penned the next book to change history. "Outliers: the story of success" (Little Brown, New York) takes the reader on a marvelous tale of men and women who toiled and strained to rise above their meager starts to become . . . great. There are world-class hockey players, software and computer billionaires, great lawyers, mathematicians. All of these "outliers" fall many standard-deviations from the top of their kind.
And like a great fairy tale writer, Gladwell deftly draws the reader deeply into his little secret: "All is not as it appears."
Was there foul play that made these people rich?
Did the hockey players' parents cheat?
Were these geniuses not as smart as they pretended to be?
Like the titillating headlines in supermarket tabloids, "Outliers" makes you turn the page to find out Bill Gates's dirty little secret of success and why certain hockey players were heads and shoulders above peers of the same age.
Masterful Plot Twists
As the story unfolds--and Gladwell's action and tension rise and fall like a Dean Koontz novel--you learn facts far from scandalous yet more intriguing, even, than an illicit affair between Queen Elizabeth and Elton John.
I'll leave the details to your reading of this fine book. But I'll tell you why this book will change the world if we let it. And why we should.
America's Shameful Education Results
Walter Williams once said that if he were the Grand Wizard of the KKK he could think of no better way to destroy blacks in America than to send them to our public schools. Just this past Saturday, Morton Kondracke on Fox News' "The Beltway Boys" said that education could be Obama's Achilles' Heel--it is so bad and the teachers' unions so corrupt and selfish. (Kondracke is the liberal.)
If you have children in public school today, unless it's one of the top 100 or so districts in the country, you probably realize that your children will leave high school far less educated than you did. Somehow we have to fix it.
Not so much recently, but a whole lot when my kids were tiny, I read reams on education reform. I drew many conclusions about the causes of our declining education--the unions, government meddling, bad homes, emphasis on entertainment over learning--but inventing a solution seemed out of reach.
The Solution to a Quagmire
Enter Gladwell. "Outliers" explains the most plausible and unmentionable (in liberal elite circles) cause and solution to American education problems since Carl Childers identified the problem with a broken roto-tiller in "Sling Blade": "I reckon it ain't got no gas, um hmm."
The model for fixing education quickly, inexpensively, and permanently is pretty straightforward. Except for the special interests. The young girl Gladwell models, Marita, has, like so many others in the book, made herself into an outlier. From single female head-of-household home with a single bedroom for the family and a minimally educate mother, Marita has become a math wizard in a special KIPP middle school in one of the worst neighborhoods in New York.
"Marita doesn't need a brand-new school with acrews of playing fields and gleaming facilities," writes Gladwell. "She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with Ph.D., or a bigger apartment. She doesn't need a higher IQ or a mind as quick Chris Langan's. All those things would be nice, of course. But they miss the point. Marita just needed a chance. And loot at the chance she was given!"
That chance, according to Gladwell, was the opportunity to work as hard as a wet-rice farmer in rural South China.
Imagine how the NEA will attack Gladwell's recommendations: longer hours in school, fewer but more intense "specials," hours of homework every night, weekend classes, and no summer vacation. The New York Times has already panned the book, as Gladwell gores one of its favorite oxen. (h/t Yglesias) Yet Michiko kakutani, the reviewer, almost certainly did NOT read the book. If he did, he clearly has little interest in education--he doesn't mention the only prescriptive part of "Outliers!" That would be like reviewing the Bible and leaving out the part about God.
Yet his evidence is unmistakable. Summer break separates the rich kids from the poor kids. In his always-remarkable research, Gladwell proves that kids from the wrong side of the tracks learn more in school--even in supposedly crappy schools in the inner city--than the rich kids in prestigious districts. The problem is that they unlearn in the summers while the rich kids keep on learning. The kids start pretty close, but each new school year, the poor kids start further behind the rich kids. As Gladwell points out, "School works. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it."
How To Make It Work
Before Christmas, buy and read "Outliers." For Christmas, buy a copy for one member of your local school board. I have already ordered a copy for a board member in my district.
This could be the most important book in a generation, but only if we are serious about fixing education in America. If not, at least you'll enjoy one of the best books I've read in a year.
Book Review: Gladwell's Writing Saves His Research - Barely
Summary: 3 Stars
I have resisted Malcolm Gladwell until now. The two previous bestsellers, the pop-lit celebrity, the untamed uprush of hair, I just didn't want to become a part of the whole thing.
But, having heard him discuss the book -- specifically, the 10,000 hour rule -- on NPR one day, I decided it was time to see what all of the fuss was about. I still don't know.
Without question, Gladwell writes in easy-breezy nonfiction prose that moves briskly and evinces real -- and sometimes really enjoyable -- talent. But, "Outliers" suffers from all of the worst symptoms of the explosive pop-econ genre that has kept steady hold on at least a few spots on the nonfiction bestseller list seemingly every week since the dawning of the new millenium in titles like "Freakonomics," Gladwell's own "The Tipping Point" and "Blink," "The Long Tail," "Traffic," and many imitators.
The research is one-sided, the arguments are anecdotal, and the conclusions are exaggeratedly profound -- and, it all marches in lockstep with the governing hypothesis.
Gladwell's thesis is that the conventional story of exceptional success by virtue of singular personal achievement is at best incomplete and may even be false. His alternative is a theory that combines some measure of innate talent with an intertwined set of specific variables like cultural history, available opportunity, and socioeconomic background and a set of seemingly random variables like luck, and circumstances of birth [non-cultural: things like month and year].
Not a bad theory in some ways, although I think that in his premise Gladwell is a little more willing than I to argue that "we" consider success to be an individual achievement and not a product of luck, timing, social and cultural circumstance, and opportunity. In fact, I would argue that in a culture where every award that is given to any individual is expected to be met by a lengthy thank you speech acknowledging the contribution to the individual's success of every relative, co-worker, family member and - ugh! - inspirational elementary school teacher the awardee ever came across, Gladwell's premise of a mistaken cultural perception of success as an individual achievement is errant.
But, so is much of the book. Gladwell doesn't so much make an argument as he does lay out pre-cooked morsels of research and anecdotal evidence that attribute individual success to non-individual qualities.
For example, he argues that it was their's parents entrepeneurial backgrounds in the garment business that launched the succesful careers of a generation of dominant New York Jewish attorneys over more agrarian or manual labor-oriented Germans and Irish. In making this point, Gladwell fails to take up the question of what became of the Jewish children of the same generation who went on to form the country's leading organized criminal gangs or to flounder in some of the nation's worst ghettoes.
In Gladwell's reckoning, it was the combination of talent and good fortune that allowed Bill Gates to get in his 10,000 hours of practice and be game-ready when the software bubble was ready to be inflated. It was an assertiveness bred in a nurturing nuclear family and fine schools that gave J. Robert Oppenheimer the skills he needed to talk himself out of an attempted murder rap and into the head job with the Manhattan Project; while, equally brilliant but raised by a single mother, genius James Langan has been unable to finish a degree, get published or do much of consequence beyond win a quarter of a million dollars circus sideshow-style on a TV game.
If Gladwell's point is that a srong family, good parents, excellent schools and a couple of lucky breaks are at the heart of many of the world's success stories: I don't think he needed to publish. Conventional wisdom has held those things to be true for a long time.
He has some stronger points to make in cultural comparison, for example, offering a very plausible evaluation of elevated rates of pilot error based on cultural norms of power-distance and in-flight communication between the captain and first officer. But, try as I might, I can't figure out what this has to do with "success" or the defininition of "outliers" that Gladwell provides.
And, he roams even further afield in offering - as though it were gospel - the explanation that rice paddy farming is to be credited for the excellence of Asian cultures in mathematics.
What Gladwell never seems to realize - or at least never explicitly writes - is that the thread that actually ties together all of his theories (Gates' 10,000 hours of practice, the success shown possible by placing low-income students into good schools that work them 7a-to-7p daily, the willingness of Asian farmers to work 3,000+ hours a year) is hard work. Call it what you want: economic privilege, cultural norm, revolutionary philosophy; whatever it is that gets a talented person into a position where they are willing to and do work harded than everyone else, with a couple of breaks, they will achieve more success.
The fact of the matter is that every one of Gladwell's examples takes advantage of the chances they get. Oppenheimer wouldn't take no for an answer, Langan does; Gates always found a way to get in another hour in front of a computer, others didn't; Asian students won't quit on a difficult math problem, Americans do.
So, race and income and family background dictate opportunity: color me less than shocked. Working harder than equally or less-talented persons will make you more succesful: not exactly covering new ground there.
Gladwell may have a winning writing talent; but, a poet philosopher he is not. Just goes to show that talent goes a long way.