Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell
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Book Reviews of Outliers: The Story of Success
Book Review: Letter to the Auther, from Jess Hamilton
Summary: 4 Stars
March 27, 2011
Dear Malcolm Gladwell,
Your book, Outliers, has brought to my attention as to the length of degree that time and place determines a person's success. The various claims and information that you have taken into consideration proved that the time a person was born and where the person grew up greatly affects the success they will have in the future. Taking advantage of that success is a whole other story, as you have said. The purpose of me reading this book is for my Senior English class where we are currently contemplating the question, to what extent do time and place define a person? Throughout the course we are studying religions, diversities, and other various topics that participate in how a people live and how they reflect on their life. Overall, time and place are the essentials as to how a person is defined. Success, which is determined on time and place, also contributes a major part in how a person is defined, as it is intelligently described in your book. I greatly enjoyed reading Outliers; the points you are making about how success creates an outlier deeply explains how time and place causes a person to be more successful than others.
One of the chapters that I found interesting was the chapter about Harlan, Kentucky. The concept of the culture of honor fascinates me for I never knew that being aggressive and more assertive was inherited through genes. I understand that being brought up in the south has influences on the way a person behaves, but I never realized that a person living in the north with southern ancestors could have inherited the same personality. After reading your chapter about culture of honor and cultural legacies, proves that a person can inherit a gene for aggressiveness. Due to this assertive behavior, people with the culture of honor are more prone to reaching success because they have the drive and the attitude to defend themselves and to achieve their goals.
Another chapter that I found informative was the chapter about the reason for the Korean plane crashes. The respect that the co-pilots show for their elders should not be presented when flying a plane. It must be understood that the pilot is just as likely to make a mistake as a co-pilot. I'm glad you addressed this because it shows a lot of how culture plays a part in everyday life and how important it is to voice one's opinions even if it is expressed to his or her elder. I feel that the cultures such as the Koreans need to learn that a person's life is more important than showing respect towards elders. Once they started to practice more communication skills, their crash rates lowered, making them more successful. This chapter proves that sometimes culture and tradition can get in the way of being successful.
I also enjoyed reading the chapter about the IQ's of Langan and Oppenheimer. Because Oppenheimer grew up in a wealthier area than Langan, he had more experience with asserting himself, resulting him to go farther in his career with an extremely high IQ. Langan had an equally high IQ as Oppenheimer but because he was raised in a poor farm setting, he did not take advantage of his intelligence and to prove to others that he was capable of greatness. In this chapter you are trying to state how the place where a person grows up in determines success. Although Langan did not have the skills to force his opinions due to the fact that he was brought up in a lower class community, he was not able to achieve the potential success he could have gained from his intelligence. Being brought up in a higher class community, such as Oppenheimer, people are taught to voice their opinions, causing more success for the future. I think it is interesting that the way that a person is brought up and taught to act, determines how much success they will gain, no matter their IQ level.
I can personally relate to the chapter that focuses on the success a person will have due to the time of the year they were born. In my early elementary years, I found myself lagging behind all the other kids in my grade. After reading your book, I realize it was due to the fact that I was born in July and the cut-off date in my school is early September, making me one of the youngest kids in my grade. The older kids who were born in late September or early October had an advantage over me because they had more capabilities to comprehend more information than my age would allow me to. I'm glad I read this book because now that it was the time I was born that was affecting my learning, not my abilities in general.
The book Outliers has really informed me about the factors that lead to success. It never came to mind how time, place, and culture affect the rates and possibilities of success. I am thankful that I was fortunate to read your book and am looking forward to read another one of your works in the future.
Sincerely,
Jess Hamilton
Book Review: A provocative, consistently engaging, occasionally amusing work that has the potential to change the way we view the world
Summary: 5 Stars
If Malcolm Gladwell did not exist, we probably would have to invent him. In his third book, Gladwell continues to demonstrate his facility for taking often obscure sociological and psychological data and theories and spinning them into an engaging popular work. What distinguishes OUTLIERS from its bestselling predecessors, THE TIPPING POINT and BLINK, is that at its heart lies a passionate argument for radically redefining our understanding of what makes people successful in a way that suggests how to create opportunities for many who might not otherwise taste its rewards.
"Outliers," by Gladwell's concise definition, are "men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary." But he's quick to reject the myth of the self-made man (for some odd reason the examples of outliers in his book are almost exclusively male). Contrary to our cherished notion that "success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all," Gladwell argues that these extraordinary people "reached their lofty status through a combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage."
What makes Gladwell's work so entertaining and his central message so easy to grasp is his ability to muster arresting examples --- some well-known and others arcane --- to illustrate this thesis. People familiar with the story of the Beatles' early career will recall the tales of the years they spent toiling in obscurity in seedy German clubs, but according to Gladwell those endless gigs afforded them the crucial opportunity to accumulate the 10,000 hours of practice necessary to attain world class expertise. He tells a similar story of Bill Gates, fortunate enough, in eighth grade, to have access to a time sharing computer that allowed him to hone his programming skills.
Then there are the accidents of birth, highlighted in the story of Joe Flom, the New York attorney who almost singlehandedly created the field of corporate takeover law. Flom wasn't simply fortunate to be the son of immigrant Jewish parents who demonstrated an intense work ethic in the garment industry; he and several of the other titans of that field happened to have been born in the early 1930s, a "demographic trough" that ensured they would have attention lavished on them by the educational system and would face relatively less competition when they entered the job market.
The benefits of such accidents are demonstrated in other fields of endeavor. Reflecting his Canadian heritage, Gladwell explains why some 40 percent of standout hockey players are born between January and March. The fact is that the cutoff date for entry into hockey leagues is January 1st, and thus the older the player the more likely he is to manifest physical superiority that will ensure selection for all-star teams, thereby securing better coaching and all the advantages that help advance an athletic career.
The second half of OUTLIERS is devoted to a discussion of cultural phenomena that contribute to success or increase the likelihood of failure. In an intriguing discussion of what he calls the "ethnic theory of plane crashes," Gladwell describes how something known as the "Power Distance Index" --- how much a particular culture values and respects authority --- helped account for the abysmal safety record of Korean Air in the 1980s and '90s, as the undue deference shown by junior members of flight crews to their superiors produced disastrous results.
Gladwell doesn't leave us without at least one practical prescription for overcoming such cultural handicaps to create a new and more inclusive model of success. He describes New York City's remarkable KIPP ("Knowledge Is Power Program") Academy, the prototype for some 50 such schools across the country. There, children from blighted neighborhoods are exposed to extended school hours, intensive academic and enrichment programs, and, perhaps most dramatically in our educational system, shortened summer vacations. The results are striking: 90 percent of the participants earn scholarships to private or parochial high schools and 80 percent attend college.
"To build a better world," Gladwell concludes, "we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success --- the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history --- with a society that provides opportunities for all." More than a collection of factoids fit only for cocktail party consumption, OUTLIERS is a provocative, consistently engaging, occasionally amusing work that has the potential to change the way we view the world, perhaps even help change the world itself.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg
Book Review: Fun book on a different idea
Summary: 5 Stars
For me, reading Gladwell's latest book was truly an example of Yogi Berra's famous quote, "It was deja vu all over again." Thirty years ago as a young psychology master's and then doctoral student, I used to (tactfully) argue with my professors that wealth, social standing and its attendant advantages, and just random good luck--were more important factors for success in life than the much vaunted influence of I.Q.--or even social intelligence itself, as Daniel Goleman argued many years later in his now famous and important book.
I pointed out that talent and genius often go unrewarded, and that a mediocre man who gets the right breaks, or simply persists and refuses to give up, can succeed where the more talented but less sedulous would give up and fail. Studies such as the famous one by Getzels and Jackson on creativity, which found that students who scored high on creativity with I.Q.s averaging 120 did as well in school as less creative students with average I.Q.s of 140, demonstrated that indeed I.Q. isn't everything.
I also argued, correctly, I believe, that even even minor negative events and bad luck in one's life tend to compound and magnify their effects more than positive events do. Why this is so I don't know, but once the positive momentum in an individual's life was lost, time and time again I saw them enter a downward spiral that was very difficult to reverse and recover from--regardless of the reasons for it--whether financial or career-related, health-related, relationship-related, or whatever.
And in my own experience, I saw people who I regarded as far more talented than I languish in obscurity, while on the other hand I saw those I thought less talented than I prosper, mostly for reasons that had more to do with random chance, or perhaps just being in the right place at the right time, than any objective qualifications or abilities.
So for me, this book was simply a long awaited confirmation of ideas and theories I'd had many years ago (and had long since abandoned and gone on to other things, since I realized my approach to psychology probably wasn't going to get me anywhere, so I became an engineer instead. :-)
I had also maintained that once one reaches an I.Q. of 120, social intelligence is more important to success in life than pure I.Q. Unless one wants to become a theoretical physicist or something, an I.Q. of 120 is enough to do anything in life, and further I.Q. points aren't so important as other qualities. As I mentioned, the Getzels and Jackson study supported this idea. In that sense, I do agree with Goleman that social intelligence is extremely important. And in the last 30 years, the evidence from neuorobiology has underscored the baleful importance of the limbic system, that truly nefarious part of our brain which underlies and controls our most powerful emotions, drives, and motivations, both good and evil. More than any other part of the brain, the limbic system is responsible for humans too often living down to their lowest and most primitive impulses and instincts instead of their higher natures and abilities.
If we look at the sad state of our society, and of the world in general, it is the unchecked power of the limbic system that has landed the world in its present sorry and precarious state. It is why we as humans fail to preserve what is good, to fight evil, to protect the weak and the sick, to promote a fair and just society, or even to get along with those whose ideas merely differ from ours.
As a unified theory of success, though, I doubt Gladwell's ideas will attract many supporters. For one thing, psychology has a vested interest in maintaining that a human's greater behavioral plasticity and ability to learn compared to other animals has always been the key to our success both as individuals and as a species. After all, psychologists would basically be out of jobs if if could be proven that lady luck or social circumstances matter more than other personality factors. If that were true, it would be better to focus academic research on social engineering ideas for creating a happier and better society, along with the economic and political capital to implement those ideas, rather than on the classical psychology of the individual itself, which is the current paradigm in psychology.
So for me Gladwell's book was more than a bit of an epiphany. Overall, it's a well written, well-documented, and fascinating book, in which Gladwell, with his usual concise and clear style, presents the evidence for a different theory of success in life which runs contrary to the whole western approach in psychology for almost the last 100 years.
Book Review: Myriad factors conributing to success in life
Summary: 5 Stars
Malcolm Gladwell has done an excellent job in explaining the backgrounds and events leading to success in life. He emphasizes on hard work, cultural and family values, and being there at the right place at the right time as the key factors. And he demolishes the myth of a "self made person" or high IQ persons dominating the successful group of persons.
There are myriad factors contributing to a person's success. He quotes that the tallest Oak tree in the forest is the tallest not because it grew from the hardest acorn, because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed thru its bark as a sampling, no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.
Like the examples he quoted about working for 10,000 hours to become really proficient in any field. Like Beatles performing upto eight hours a day in Berlin for a few years. And Bill Joy and Bill Gates spending lots of time programing computers. Of the three books he wrote so far (The Tipping Point and Blink are the other two), this is easily his best work. Probably because, like his theory, he spent more than 10,000 hours writing other articles and books ! Another example is the case of Kids who are exhorted by their middle or upper class parents to study and engage themselves in academic activities during summer vacation, gain significantly while the others who do nothing come out as loosers.
He explains the Mathew effect which deals with cutoff dates and distribution of birth months of the selected people for any subgroup. In Canadian hockey league, the cutoff date is Jan 1. A significant number of players are January born and very fewer of them are December born. The people born in January are physically and mentally more matured than the ones in December because the latter are about a year younger. At young ages, one year of age difference makes a big difference. The older kids start off with a bit of advantage. And that gets amplified because of their selection and better coaching, more facilities etc.
He states that beyond a certain threshold, IQ does not contribute much to a person's success. And cites the study of Lewis Terman at Stanford which selected a group of high IQ kids and followed their life. None of this group made it to the top like winning a Nobel Prize. And probably not so surprisingly, two of the eventual Nobel prize winners William Shockley and Luis Alvarez were rejected by Terman while they were kids and he was selecting his elite group, on grounds of insufficient IQ !
He traces the backgrounds of some of the most successful Jewish lawyers in New York. Through the origins of their forefathers being involved in garment making in European countries. The forefathers became successful immigrants doing meaningful work of garment manufacturing and sent their children to very good schools and colleges. And more importantly these lawyers took up mergers and acquisitions which the WASP lawyers did not touch. As the mergers and acquisitions took off in the 1970s, the Jewish lawyers were at the right place at the right time to exploit the opportunity and climb the ladder.
He talks about another group of people whose cultural background made their descendents very successful. The rice farmers from the Pearl Delta of South China. These farmers are the most hard working, making use of small tracts of lands diligently to produce the most rice per acre. And using the off season time like winters to involve in other productive activities like planning. Their descendents are very successful in Math and made it to the top Universities in US.
He quotes a couple of airline crashes which happened due to the pilots coming from a cultures which are deferential to age and authority. A Columbian airliner which crashed a few miles short of JFK due to fuel exhaustion. The crew in this case were not aggressive enough in explaining their dire situation, caused by stormy weather and its consequent enroute delays, to the American air traffic controllers. And a Korean airliner which crashed into a mountain in Guam in bad weather. Presumably because the pilot did not question his Captain, due to a cultural barrier. Korean airlines later trained its crew to be proficient in English, the universal language of air traffic control, and to be very aggressive in questioning authority. And there has been no crash since then.
Finally, he himself proves to be an Outlier (a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in a sample) due to a strong work ethic and cultural values espoused by his Jamaican parents and forefathers.
Book Review: A Study of Success
Summary: 5 Stars
Rehearsed, choreographed, and perfected talent coupled with ambition and a healthy dose of luck is the perfect cocktail for success according to Malcolm Gladwell. In "Outliers," Gladwell shows just how individuals who hone their skills, arrive on the scene at just the right time, and leverage relationships rise to prominence in their respective careers. He delves into the factors facilitating success. It is a timely subject intimately sought by those seeking to uncover whatever "it" is that catapults some individuals to success and leaves most others stuck on the launch pad.
In a world we only recently learned was flat, every advantage, not surprisingly, is sought by every individual in every country. Gladwell writes an impressive new chapter in the classic debate regarding the importance of nature versus nurture. Recent similar works have added to the knowledge base, such as "Talent is Overrated," "The Bell Curve," and "The Snowball." All help to illustrate the necessity, and differing faces, of life advantages. The power of compounding, which Einstein remarked "the human mind cannot comprehend," is applied to life advantages; whether earned or not, propel the ready in life to greatness. And guess what? These outliers typically have had not only superior ability in whatever their chosen fields, but not surprisingly the "secret" of their success is the superior combination of ability (through intense practice), opportunity, and luck. The old adage of "no one does it alone" comes up in the work time and again.
Gladwell cites a great example in youth hockey league leading to NHL superstars. Players born closest to the new year in hockey league registration are included in the same group as those born on Dec. 31st of the same year. This essentially gives some boys up to a year's worth of growth, cognitive skill development, and agility over another player born later in the calendar year. The "early birds" are consequently believed to better players by their coaches, given additional training, and proportionally develop into the largest cohort of NHL stars. Pretty interesting, Wiki some of your favorite players and you'll see the trend. This example could just have easily been expanded to include school registration, ballet, art, driver's education or a host of other activities based on the age registration system.
"Outliers" amalgamates a series of vital factors, probably no more than a half dozen, that ultimately seem to determine exponential success from mediocrity. If one was to look at a bell curve, the vast majority of humanity naturally falls in the belly. Only on the extreme tails do we find the aptly termed outliers. Although few, these variables Gladwell returns to frequently appear to be vital (this shouldn't shock anyone who has taken the time to study the composition of many professional career fields and their respective superstars, noted authors, leading woman, industry leaders, or top experts.)
To identify and concentrate perceived talent from a handful of blue chip institutions whose degrees lend themselves to a "halo effect" pedigree, which leads to what Gladwell describes as "accumulative advantage," the classic aphorisms start to rear their ugly heads now. "It takes money to make money," "Like father like son," and a host of not-so politically correct sayings emerge. And there's the rub, like the Indian caste system. Who could then honestly deny that a not-so-invisible caste system exists and persists? Which in my opinion gets to heart of Gladwell's work.
Probably the most actionable part of "Outliers" is our ability, as a society, to find, develop, and unleash the untold talent that walks amongst us. It is this talent whose benefit to society can be enjoyed by all--from the phenomenal music of the Beatles to the writing of John Irving. And there is where I have one fault, or better put, omission in "Outliers." I will call it the "Gattaca Factor," after the aptly named movie. There is little mention of the struggle, misery and failure that builds a tenacious hunger for success. I argue that this trait is probably why so many successful business entrepreneurs and performance artists don't have formal educational degrees; scripted success blocked their potential for the proverbial "luck," instead they sought it out of their own accord. There plenty of these examples to cement the belief that anything is possible, even if every advantage wasn't afforded to you.