Outliers, The Story Of Success 357
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.
| Outliers | |
| author | Malcolm Gladwell |
| pages | 301 |
| publisher | Little, Brown and Co. |
| rating | Excellent. |
| reviewer | Leon Malinofsky |
| ISBN | 978-0-316-03669-6 |
| summary | Success comes from external factors or unsuspected internal ones. |
Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. Outliers — those persons of exceptional accomplishment — typically have lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden causes of their status.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level, and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history. However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just beginning to boom when they hit their stride.
Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in defending themselves, their reputations and honor.
Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. This chapter is interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.
Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard, intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which outstrips growers of other crops. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.
The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours, which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.
You can purchase Outliers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Looks like a very interesting book, very much in the flavor of Freakonomics, in that it uses each chapter to explore a completely different phenomenon and simply orbits around a nebulous main argument.
I very much like that approach because it leaves me, as a reader, feeling like I've taken an adventure and seen a lot in the course of a book; it appeals to casual readers who like their nonfiction to be as exciting and as unpredictable as their fiction.
I expect to pick it up from the library as soon as I can. Thanks for your review!
Malcolm Gladwell has found a niche (Score:3, Informative)
This seems to be his third or fourth book of this type. Not that I'm complaining - I've read Blink, and Tipping Point - both very interesting reads. It gives some of the explanations behind behaviours that I've noticed, but hadn't thought about why they occurred.
Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:3, Informative)
Specifically, an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Malcolm Gladwell has found a niche (Score:3, Informative)
It covers similar topics and (I think) does a better job.
Malcolm Gladwell (Score:4, Informative)
I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.
I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Informative)
I would recommend you have a read of this guys previous book "Blink" if you have not read it before. It also bears a similar style and takes you on a bit of an adventure.
I read Blink and Freakonomics back to back and thought they complimented each other quite well even thought they were by different authors on different subjects.
Blink is largely about how snap judgements are not necessarily bad and is suggesting that you can make them better with practice. He suggests a number of examples in order to formulate tools that will improve your own quick decision making ability so when there really is not time to rationalise a problem fully you can still make a best guess.
True some of the suggestions are obvious but the examples made it worth a read.
Re:Well, statistics says this must be true, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Except that Bill Gates himself acknowledges that he had very, very unique opportunities that allowed him to be in the right place at the right time.
You are falling right into the mindset that Gladwell very effectively unwinds in his book.
Plenty of people have a killer business instinct. Few are in the position to capitalize on it the way Gates did.
Gladwell never claims that it's all blind luck for guys like Gates and Joy. Rather, it's talent PLUS practice PLUS temperament PLUS blind luck. Gates had it all. Take away one of these elements, and you end up like some of the other case studies in the book (brilliant but wrong temperament, brilliant but bad timing, etc.).
Re:Well, statistics says this must be true, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Something the reviewer doesn't make clear, that Gladwell spends a lot of time talking about, is just how important BillG's birthdate was. There was apparently a narrow window of opportunity; if you were born before that, you were already entrenched in another field when computers became huge, and if you were born after that you couldn't ever manage to stay up: you weren't in the bubble. Gladwell submitted as evidence that the window of opportunity was about two years long, and in those two years were born Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy -- well, here, let me just quote a partial transcript of Malcolm Gladwell talking about the book [andyross.net]:
"January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age. The perfect age to be in 1975 is young enough to see the coming revolution but not so old as to have missed it. You want to be 20 or 21, born in 1954 or 1955.
Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, was born on October 28, 1955.
Paul Allen, the other co-founder of Microsoft, was born on January 21, 1953.
Steve Ballmer, the present CEO of Microsoft, was born on March 24, 1956.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was born on February 24, 1955.
Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, was born on April 27, 1955.
Bill Joy was born on November 8, 1954."
He's not saying that only people born then become successful, or that every person born then becomes successful, but that people born then have a much greater chance of being successful in a particular field that is just opening up.
Re:Malcolm Gladwell has found a niche (Score:4, Informative)
> Tipping Point
Note that "Tipping Point" is also on the Navy reading list [militarypr...glists.com]. "Blink" is on the Coast Guard reading list [militarypr...glists.com] as well. Gladwell, getting it done...
Numbers in Asian languages shorter/more logical? (Score:4, Informative)
I was a Chinese major, studied and lived in Japan for 4 years and am fluent in both languages. I've also studied a small bit of Korean as well.
I'm not sure how words for numbers could be more "logical" in these languages. In fact, in Korean there are two number naming systems -- one of native origin and the other of Chinese origin -- that can be used for values up to 100. (Japanese has this as well, but only up to 10.) For higher values the Chinese number names are used. So I doubt it has anything to do with language. Rather, I could see the the use of the abacus as a teaching tool as a big advantage, since it seems to confer a visceral knowledge of numbers and calculations that would be hard to acquire otherwise. Many people I know who became proficient with an abacus can visualize one in their head and use that visualization to do calculations.
That said, learning "Indian methods of calculation" seems to have become popular in Japan recently. There are at least two Nintendo DS games that give instruction on how to do arithmetic using methods taught in Indian schools (I own one of them).
Re:Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:4, Informative)
I don't think he ever implied that in the book - he stated quite often during the book that it still required plenty of innate talent and hard work to succeed. In that chapter the book practically worships Bill Joy's intellect as well as the hard work it took to gain that 10,000 hours experience.
There are lots of people with talent that work just as hard that don't succeed - the book tries answer why by examining what else is required, and concludes that circumstance plays a significant part.
Re:Interesting (Score:2, Informative)