Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Good summer reading for Americans, but no new insight
Summary: 2 Stars
I don't know how to rate this popular book. I give it four stars for story telling, and one star for originality.
Following two best-selling books, Malcolm Gladwell again masterfully turns bits of trivia into fascinating tales and keeps you turning the pages. From hockey players to computer nerds to airline pilots, it's a series of detective accounts of unusual people around the world famous and not-so famous. The book is an easy and entertaining reading on lazy and hazy summer days, especially for these with a curious mind, preferably well-versed in American culture.
But borrow it from your local library or buy it used. You won't want to read it again due to its total lack of original insights.
One review on this site has already pointed out that 80 percent of the content is known on the net and the rest of the material really just comes from one nice book, Annette Lareau's "Unequal Childhoods." Enough said. I will focus on new insight: does the book have any?
First, the book can be summed up as: "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." This is probably the most famous line uttered by Thomas Edison, arguably the most successful and best-known inventor of all time, with more than a thousand patents to his name. I cannot imagine Gladwell is unaware of this statement. But neither this line nor Edison the extraordinary outlier was in the book. Edison's only mention is on page 37: "He (Bill Gates) is sometimes called the Edison of the Internet." Throughout the book, Gladwell writes as if he has stumbled on something profound and new. It is not. Neither is "talent alone is enough" as deep-rooted a belief in America as Gladwell claims. I recently wrote to a Wall Street Journal writer who penned How Calvin Learned His Ride. [...] To my surprise, Matthew Futterman is totally unaware of this book, yet in that short article he laid out exactly the same logic of success for American racehorse riders: early start and years of endless practice. According to Futterman, that's only possible at the bush tracks in the Cajun country, and that's exactly where most of the star riders came from. Calvin Borel, who almost became the first jockey to win the Triple Crown with different horses, was first put on horseback at age 2, "by the time he began race-riding legally at 16, he already had thousands of races under his belt. After years of riding with a stopwatch he had developed an internal clock in his head and could sense the difference between an eighth-of-a-mile that took 12 seconds and one that took 13."
Second, the insight that one needs a fortunate set of circumstances to be successful is best captured by a pair of opposite Chinese maxims: Tian Shi, Di Li, Ren He (timing, place, social environment are all right for success), Shen Bu Feng Shi (not born at the right time). There is a large social inequality literature with deeper insight in a Western context that the book ignores.
Third, the idea that IQ is but one measure of personal ability is not new: the theory of multiple intelligences was proposed by Howard Gardner in 1983. [...] The idea that success depends on a raw intrinsic intellect has been largely discredited. In the classical experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in 1970, we have learned that the innate ability to control impulsive behavior, what Mischel called "delayed gratification," is the single most important factor in determining a child's future success.
Fourth, the idea that once discovered/developed (e.g., the code for computer operating system), no more chance for future generations is best expressed in John Horgan's 1996 book, The End of Science. The importance of jumping into a new field at the right time is better articulated in the 2005 book On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins.
In places where Gladwell seems to be striking out, he is mistaken. For example, he attributes Chinese cultural success at math to rice paddy cultivation. But wait, Chinese civilization was developed in the wheat-growing north whereas the southern rice cultivating regions were long considered backward barbarian lands. My mother, who was born in Burma by Chinese immigrant parents, often tells me stories about how lazy southeast Asian rice farmers were: they would plant rice and stayed home until it's time for harvest. Conditions vary, but I am very skeptical that the requirement for constant back-breaking labor necessarily leads to certain work ethic. His air pilot story is challenged by other reviewers who know the industry.
The conventional wisdom Gladwell challenges is not universal, but perhaps modern America alone. In fact, the opposite is true for the Asian educational tradition and culture. There, and under the guidance of Asian mom in America, young students spend way too much time on structured learning and exam drills. One may wonder if Chris Langan is the unfortunate by-product of an extremely free-flowing and dynamic culture. Do you want to waste a few potential outliers or suppress a whole generation?
While a wake-up call to overly permissible American educators is necessary, the book's suggestion that the government ought to reduce outliers' reward because they should be more grateful for their social circumstances could only lead to a less motivated and dynamic society.
Mcbooks like this and The World Is Flat are what sell well. They are entertaining and educational, but unlikely to have lasting power. As Xu Zhuyuan pointed out, Fast Company will probably regret calling Mr. Gladwell "the Drucker of the 21st century." [...] Years from now, people would be still reading Peter Drucker, but not Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman.
Book Review: Arise, Awake, Stop not till 10,000 is reached!
Summary: 3 Stars
For the last few weeks I have been mulling over the number 10,000.
Malcolm Gadwell has popularized social science in a series of big hit books such as Tipping Point and Blink. With due apologies for being rather uncharitable, I do tend to think of these as the bubble gum version of non fiction books (i.e. read the title and the contents page and pretty much know what is being said!).
Nevertheless the writer has a real knack for simplifying and popularizing concepts. This latest book, Outliers has hit the shelves and is a hit with readers.
His thesis is that exceptional performance in life, in any endeavor, is not a matter of inborn genius, but rather the circumstances and conditioning that led to it.
You might go, 'ah...genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration' as Edison once famously said - and you would be right! That about sums it up.
However, he uses the latest tools and contemporary examples to make this point. One intriguing concept in this book is the number 10,000. He says that social science research shows that anyone (anyone) who puts 10,000 hours of practice in any endeavor is going to become an elite performer in that field.
Lets put a caveat here. If you practice golf for 10,000 hours, that does not mean you become Tiger Woods. But here is the kicker. If you put in 10,000 hours of practice in golf, you can compete with Tiger Woods! The above insight was genuinely intriguing that I decided to ruminate on this a bit.
What does 10,000 hours of practice mean?
Lets say I come back from work everyday and spend 1.5 hours practicing my favorite activity. Piano. Golf Swing, Singing. Essay writing. Whatever. Lets say I do this, to be reasonable 5 days a week. And 45 weeks a year (accounting for holidays, emergencies etc). That is 337.5 hours per year. 10 years is still only 3,375 hours....!
Another example. Lets take a normal activity like eating (could just as easily be wine tasting). 3 meals a day. Again 1.5 hours? This time it needs to be every day. So 1.5 hrs times 7 days a week time 52 weeks a year. That is still only 546 hours per year.
I think with my experience in consulting and management I am good at presentations and communication. Lets take 'powerpoint' skills, and lets see if I can compete with the tiger woods of powerpoint. I have been in this business for 15+ years. Lets say I have done 3 major assignments a year. Each assignment required 3 big presentations (one at the beginning, one at the middle and one final presentation). Lets say it took me 10 hours to write each presentation (not counting all the other team members who contributed to it). That is a grand total of 1,530 hours! N-o-w-h-e-r-e close to the 10,000 mark!
What does this mean then? A couple of insights from the above example.
1. 10,000 hours is difficult to get to and will take several decades.
2. If it is an activity like sport, then the window is going to be very early and narrow (say 18 - 30 years). Which means one has to start when one is a child. Which explains why parents go batty over their talented children.
3. Even if you count your own profession (like i did with powerpoint presentation as an example) and a particular skill it is going to be hard to come up with 10,000 hours.
3. If you commit to 10,000 hours of anything be warned that you are giving up a 'balanced' life.
Implications: Assuming you buy into the 10,000 hour theory (for which there is an equally strong argument not to...which is ripe for discussion, but not the thrust here), there are a few implications for ourselves as well as what decisions we make for our children in terms of where they focus their attention and talents.
A. If 10,000 gets you elite status. What does 5,000 get you? This is my own addition here. Let us assume 5,000 gets you 'professionally competent' status. You could set a floor and a ceiling for any endeavor, should you be serious about it.
For fun, here is a curve (my own thoughts - unscientific):
1,000 - Appreciator (!)
2,000 - Dabbler
3,000 - Know just enough to cause harm
5,000 - Professionally competent
7,500 - Elite
10,000 - One in a million, super elite.
B. If you are motivated to excel in some field, you better be 'inwardly' passionate about it, otherwise life will become one gigantic slog!
C. When it comes to children, just because somebody else observes they are good at something, dont force them into it unless they take to it by themselves. I have seen way too many example of kids who hate what they have been forced into.
D. Take care to pick what you are going to focus on. Or on the other hand you can sprinkle your interests among a variety of things so you can maintain a 'portfolio of interests'.
In summary, even though we may not strictly buy into this 10,000 concept, it is a useful yardstick to ask ourselves how we are spending our time, and what value that is adding to the quality of our lives.
Also the decisions we make on time for ourselves and our children have serious consequences either in terms of opportunity lost or forcing someone to do something they did not like.
In my own personal life, I had, before I read this book, and continue to operate on the principle of 'general proficiency' rather than 'star specialist' to sample life in all its richness.
Book Review: A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Summary: 1 Stars
According to Nietzsche, Kant writes what the common man believes in a language that the common man cannot understand. Malcolm Gladwell, it must be said, vigorously reaffirms what the common man believes in a language that the common man CAN understand, thus flattering the common man and "making him happy." "To be made happy": a Gladwellism for "to be satisfied with a consumer item, such as a book by Malcolm Gladwell."
In OUTLIERS (2008), Gladwell argues, in essence: "It is better to be mediocre than it is to be brilliant!" Perhaps that is too blunt of a truncation, but the book seems to welcome such simplicity.
We are introduced to Chris Langen, "the public face of genius in American life" [70], who nonetheless works in construction and "despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal" [95]. Langen fails because he was raised in abject squalor, and his mother "missed a deadline for his financial aid" [98]. By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, a "success" for his complicity in the atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was "raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan" [108]. Other actors on the community-theater proscenium include Marita, a twelve year old from an impoverished family who gives up her evenings, weekends, and friends to slave away in one of New York City's most rigorous and competitive middle schools. She will succeed, Gladwell suggests, because she "works hard" and is given a "chance." Indeed, Bill Gates was a "success" because he was given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal at the age of thirteen. The Beatles were a "success" because they forced themselves to perform eight-hour concerts in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. Along the way, the reader is pepper-sprayed with anecdotes about Korean aviation and Kentuckian aggression that have no apparent relevance to the thesis of the book, except to "demonstrate" that one's "cultural legacy" sometimes has to be jettisoned in order for one to become "successful."
Gladwell is arguing, in nuce, that success--euphemistic for "financial prosperity"--corresponds not to one's intelligence, but rather to opportunity and social savoir-faire. The thesis isn't so much false as it is banal. Of course, one must have social skills and opportunity to be "successful." And yet I would contend, pace Gladwell, that even social skills and opportunity are not enough, by themselves, for an individual to succeed financially. Life never brooks such easy recipes (or follows such "predictable courses" [267], to use Gladwell's language).
What, precisely, does Gladwell mean by "intelligence"? Quite ironically, the author hypostatizes the Intelligence Quotient Test and thus subscribes to the false supposition that intelligence can be quantified and measured. If you receive 180 on the Intelligence Quotient Test, in other words, then you are a super-genius. Now, I did, in fact, score 180 on the I.Q. Test, but that, in itself, is no guarantor of my genius. Intelligence is an impalpable thing, and there is no necessary relationship whatsoever between one's intelligence and the I.Q. examination, just as, following Gladwell, there is no necessary relationship between one's I.Q. score and "success."
Moreover, Gladwell ignores the temporal differences that separate his stories. Oppenheimer lived in an America that was less intimidated by, and envious of, intelligence than the America of the twenty-first century. I differ from Gladwell, and my counter-thesis is the following: Even if Langen possessed superior social skills, it is very likely that he still would have failed in life.
Why? Because the culture has become a home for Swiftian Lilliputians, ever-ready to manacle down any Gulliver who comes their way. Yes, Gladwell is correct in suggesting that geniuses almost always fail and the mediocre almost always triumph, but he completely misses the reasons. You cannot possibly succeed if you are a genius unless you camouflage, to a certain extent, your intelligence. We are living a culture that, instead of lionizing intelligence, disdains it. Those who possess a higher intellect than the multitude are looked upon with acrimony and mistrust. Such is the "leveling-off" or equalization of all distinction to which polymaths and geniuses, such as myself, have long since grown accustomed.
Similarly, there is the impulse in this book to anathematize genius, as if genius were some kind of cancerous polyp that should be excised. It is not difficult to detect a certain defensiveness in Gladwell's anti-intellectualist posturing, not merely as if the myth that genius equals success needed to be debunked, but as if genius, in itself, were something intrinsically negative, threatening--damaging, even. Gladwell, non-genius, is content to attack genius in OUTLIERS with the same vehemence with which he attacked critical thinking in BLINK. And for exactly the same affective reason: Gladwell is as intimidated by genius as he is cowed by critical thought, for which he substitutes anecdotes lifted, quite uncritically, from single sources: books by John Ed Pierce, Richard E. Niebett and Dov Cohen, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin...
Gladwell's most ardent admirers --- non-brilliant readers who want reassurance that their non-brilliance is a formula for success --- sigh plaintively and bleat. And the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.
P.S. Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the expansion of power comes from opportunity in the early sixteenth century. But he qualified: from opportunity and through cleverness ("virtu" in Italian).
Dr. Joseph Suglia
Book Review: Read it, but keep an open mind.
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is an excellent read if you've ever posed the questions about success and upbringing that the author has on his mind. It's entertaining in this way, and makes some truly excellent points.
I'd like to make a couple of points about the presumptions of the book, though:
First, the importance of success in our culture is obvious, and of course, Gladwell never questions it. Success in career, and to a lesser extent money, is simply treated as everyone's ultimate goal. Obviously people want this for their kids, and the books best audience is the huge number of parents who want to raise their children in such a way as to grant them success. It's not exactly a secret to me that pure analytical intelligence isn't the only key to success, and Gladwell illustrates this extremely well.
Because success is so crucial to the material, the author could've spent a chapter or so really getting into the price of it. Many successful people simply aren't happy in my experience. They may feel that they are more important than others because of their value to the communities they inhabit, but whether or not that attitude is really beneficial to society isn't discussed. I love the opening story of the town of Roseta, and what it says about community involvement and health. Does it ever occur to Gladwell that, in a town made up mostly of slate mine workers and textile people, that the importance he places on success is irrelevant there, and probably better off for it?
This is America, and we truly live to work here. 'Community' in the sense of a place where we all can belong is an outdated concept, unfortunately. The desire for success that Gladwell exhorts so strongly is responsible for lots of great advances, and fulfillment to those who have greatly contributed to it, but it can also be seen as a blight on neighborly behavior, a personality defect for some that discourages modesty, self-sacrifice, and balance. Families of successful people fail at about the same rate as other families, if not greater, depending on what profession we're discussing. Raising children to be self-interested success machines isn't necessarily in the interest of our communities at large, and Gladwell completely disregards that concept with his glowing praise for KIPP schools. I understand why, but I can't agree. In this light, the book is geared at the type of family that already is, or is trying very hard, to raise their children in the manner of "concerted cultivation".
Second, and this is arguable I know: Chris Langan's views on authority and institutional policy are basically treated as the ravings of a depressed lunatic who doesn't understand the system he failed to manipulate in his favor. I know Gladwell thinks more highly of Langan than that, but Gladwell was treated better by the system, and so he naturally thinks that Langan is simply wrong.
He's not, as least not like Gladwell implies.
The higher education system has it's problems, and some people who've been deeply involved in it's inner workings know it. Gladwell, as a positive product of that system, should be a bit more balanced when he writes about it.
The problem isn't simply that Chris Langan was a failure in a fair system due to his people skills. Why should a student have to be such a charmer simply to do something as basic as switching a class or getting the forms for his scholarship reviewed? Why would any professor tell a student that some people "just don't have the intellectual firepower" to succeed at their subject? These types of behaviors on the part of teachers are disciplinary problems for them more than Langan. That great freedom and love of knowledge the author appreciates so much about universities is certainly lacking in some places and with some teachers, and it is completely beyond the control of most students. The system isn't fair to everyone, and not schmoozing properly shouldn't decide one's educational future.
In a way, Langan is right. Manipulating, Oppenheimer-style, the system in your favor guarantees that someone operating in that system will be in favor of preserving it, because it works for them. Truly rebellious types, those who have a real problem with authority, ARE frequently dismissed by that system, or are told to change their attitude. This is a natural way of preserving order. I just wonder how many insightful (but rude) rebels who would have made some real and necessary changes to the system at large have been dismissed due to that mindset in education.
On that note, lets remember something else about all of this: Genius shouldn't necessarily be exalted above everything else anyway. Smart people are just as screwed up as the rest of us, and they shouldn't necessarily have all of the opportunities and advantages we can possibly bestow on them. This is especially true anywhere that morality comes into play. Gladwell did say, when discussing the two prominent methods of raising kids, that neither was morally superior to the other, and what I'm trying to say is that our society's way of bestowing rewards on the different types of people those methods create has some inherent flaws that will eventually demand our attention.
There's only room for a certain number of true outliers in society, by definition. Someone needs to start a discussion on finding ways for the rest of us to live better lives. If Gladwell writes THAT, then I'll read it, and I'd love it if he started with the town of Rosetta.
Book Review: Accidents matter
Summary: 4 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell is a great synthesizer. He's masterful at taking a few random ideas and events and weaving them into a pattern that can help us see how the world operates. He's got a reputation as a deep thinker, but I'd suggest that he's not thinking deeply as much as broadly -- though that still has tremendous value.
In "Outliers," Gladwell looks at people whose achievements have put them far on the end of the success scale (and, in one memorable chapter about airline pilots, at the failure end). Gladwell challenges the notion that these people were self-made, and that their outsized achievements were due completely or almost completely to their capabilities and effort. Gladwell dissects their achievements to show that each person or group of people benefited from being in the right place at the right time, with just enough cultural capital and smarts to take advantage of the fluke of time and place.
Gladwell makes a compelling argument, and his examples are solid. While some reviewers have pointed out that Gladwell's research seems to be little more that Wikipedia citings and well-known books and journals, he has done a good job of putting that information into a coherent whole. He's not using dubious information or making things up, so I'm not sure why some people have raised a fuss. Gladwell is doing what popularizers always do: They take original work created by others and turn it into something that's more accessible and relevant to a wider audience. It's no different than a history book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Anyway, what's in the book? The book looks at several types of high achievers and asks how those folks got there. Inevitably, it's a combination of luck and effort -- whether it's top amateur hockey players in Canada, Bill Gates and Bill Joy, or top New York City lawyers. Each person was born at an ideal time and was able to leverage his small advantages over others into an overwhelming advantage in adulthood. For hockey players, it's the benefits of being a few months older than competing kids, which then leads to getting selected to elite teams and getting better and more practice as a teen. With Gates and Joy, it was access to computers right at the time when programming first became relatively efficient to do. For the lawyers, it was being forced to work in mergers-and-acquisition law when top firms wouldn't hire them, and then being the most knowledgeable about that type of law when it became the most lucrative part of law in the 1980s.
Along the way, Gladwell provides interesting asides about how cultures (especially American) have advanced over the decades, and what was important at what time. It makes you think about how you would position yourself for the next breakthrough opportunity -- and if it's possible to see it coming. And it also makes you think about the inordinate effort that the most successful still had to undertake in order to seize the advantage.
However, the book has some weaknesses. One is that Gladwell only occasionally writes about people who were also in the same place at the same time and didn't seize the opportunity. Why didn't they? Was it brains, effort, culture? Probably it's a combination of all those factors, but I'd like to see more discussion about missed opportunities.
Also, the success stories in the book don't vary very much. People are either filthy rich or have risen to the top of the law-medical-academic profession. What about a religious leader or a community organizer? What about an entertainer besides The Beatles? Variation would have been good.
Another weakness is (pointed out by others) is that Gladwell's definition of success, and therefore of an outlier, is vague. It seems to have something to do with absolution pinnacles of wealth and power -- The Beatles, robber barons, Bill Gates, and Robert Oppenheimer. But it also seems to have to do with guys who are just super-successful lawyers, but who didn't have any lasting impact on the profession, or kids who have risen out of poverty to go to college, or kids who won college hockey scholarships.
Yet, truly unique people -- the ones who change the world -- can't be produced by a standardized system. But the ones who do well, and perhaps beyond expectations, actually can be produced by a system. The system isn't always fair, as richer kids have a much better chance of winning in the academic world, for example. But that's a very different issue than how The Beatles found their magic. Gladwell is drawing a link between the two that they both are reflections of their time, place, culture, etc., but I think that argument is stretched.
The other thing that's annoying about the book is Gladwell's written tic. He italicizes words and phrases that he wants to emphasize. It's as if he thinks we're not smart enough to understand the point he's making, so he has to lay it out for us.
One final note. Up until the last chapter, the book reads like a business school case study. It's written clearly, and it has occasional humor and memorable characters or events. But it feels impersonal. Then, in the last chapter, Gladwell changes tone. He tells his family's tale as it reflects his thesis, and it's quite moving. It's a great way to end the book, and, frankly, a little more of that emotion would have been beneficial all the way through.