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.
Well, statistics says this must be true, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Surprise! You actually aren't god's gift to business after all.
As far as Bill Gates goes though, if you look at his early history he was indeed in the right place at the right time, but he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
At a very early computer conference, all the other people got up and allowed as how there was going to be plenty of room in this new industry for all the different manufacturers. Only Bill got up and said "you guys are all wrong, there's going to be one winner and the rest will lose".
Say what you want about Bill's business methodologies, but I think he's actually about the poorest example of the "outlier" effect that you can find.
G.
Nobel Prize winning physicists from a valley... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the book "The making of the Atomic Bomb" the author, Richard Rhodes, points out something very much like this.
One might think that the distribution of Nobel Prize winning physicists might have a normal distribution, but there is a valley in Hungary (if I remember the book correctly) that has an inordinate amount of Nobel Prize winners.
He makes the case that their elementary level education had a role in this. Students were doing inventive things on their own in math and science at a very early age. As a result, a more natural and internal approach to these subjects followed them through life and put them in a better position to do ground-breaking research.
By the way, if you have not read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" I highly recommend it. Not just because of its account of the events of the Manhattan Project, but also because it goes into the philosophy of the 1800's which resulted in the pursuit of bigger, better weapons to rage "Total War". The chemical weapons of WWI were a result of this as well.
Re:Well, statistics says this must be true, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Evita sang it best (Patti LuPone, not Madonna):
I was stuck at the right place at the perfect time
Filled a gap - I was lucky, but one thing I'll say for me
Noone else can fill it like I can
Re:Mr. Anecdote (Score:4, Interesting)
Steve Martin would have made another great chapter (Score:2, Interesting)
I read Malcolm Gladwell's book about a month ago and I just finished Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, this morning. What I found remarkable was that Steve Martin's book exactly parallels the process that Malcolm Gladwell talks about.
Steve Martin's book begins:
"I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."
There are other parallels such as having the opportunity to work at Disneyland from a young age and being exposed to performance and magic tricks. The most important point is that Steve Martin spent years and years refining his craft.
----
Also, interesting is this very positive review of Gladwell's book by Tomas Sowell, an ultra-conservative economist (Gladwell is an obvious liberal)
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384/ [capmag.com]
Re:No, it really depends on you (Score:3, Interesting)
First, who's the "you" you are addressing here?
And you are making the case that Gladwell basically starts with- that successful people are successful simply because they have some unique talent (like having good judgment).
No example of an "outlier" success story in this book isn't immensely talented. But in addition to their talent, they had other supplementary skills (i.e. not just intellectually smart, but also people-smart, and/or creative, etc.), worked hard, and were in the right place at the right time.
Gladwell doesn't really do a great job of summarizing his main argument, in my opinion, but it boils down to this: Highly successful people are pretty smart (but Gladwell argues that you only have to be "smart enough"; success doesn't track linearly with intelligence once you hit the "pretty smart and higher" region), have supplementary talents, work hard, come from the "right" background (though what "right" means here is typically only clear in hindsight) AND were in the right place at the right time.
Not mentioned in the review is the work of Lewis Terman, who identified a cohort of really smart California kids ("Termites") in the 1920's and tracked them for years. The outcomes of the "brightest of the brightest" were not particularly notable; Gladwell explains some of the reasons why.
Some of the reasoning in this book is suspect. (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Gladwell's description of the mechanics windshear was inaccurate. Perhaps he understood what he was saying when he wrote it, but the way it reads sound s like he is saying that when a plane is flying into a headwind, the pilots need to use more power, and then if that headwind shears to a tail wind, all of a sudden, the plane is going too fast to land. This is really the opposite of what is true. Pilots don't really care so much about their ground speed as they approach the runway, only their airspeed. You don't use more power going into a head wind, because using more power would increase your airspeed. On really windy days, you can get small airplanes to track backwards over the ground, but they still have a positive airspeed within the normal operating limits. If a headwind shears to a tail wind, you don't have too much momentum, you have too little airspeed.
2) The idea that these non-US countries were less safe to fly in because of their culture of not questioning superiors is also questionable. Each airline has a corporate which ends up defining how crew members interact. Guess what, 40+ years ago, the corporate culture in the airlines in this country (USA) was similar to Korean Air's culture 15 years ago. The US airlines made a point to change their cultures, and safety was enhanced greatly. When the US consultants when to Korean Air, the same thing happened there. But there is no reason to say that the unsafe culture was do to Korean philosophies -- just a less modern attitude toward cockpit resource management.
3) Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are always awful to read about. I think Malcolm missed the really big explanation for the CFIT crash that he describes. Historically, the ground proximity warning systems in large aircraft were not vary accurate at all. They were based mostly on rates of change of radar altitude, and were highly prone to calling out warnings when there was no problem, just spurious readings from the radar altimeter. As a result, pilots learned to not take advice from these units seriously. If they had, the accident Gladwell discusses certainly would not have happened. Modern enhanced ground proximity warning systems (eGPWS) use GPS and a database of obstructions, and are very reliable. With a reliable instrument, comes trust, and a pilot today, getting a warning from eGPWS is far less likely to make the same mistake.
If there are so many basic reasoning problems with chapter 7, how many problems are there in chapters outside my areas of expertise?
All this said, I'd recommend the book, it's a NYT bestseller, and it is very well written and thought provoking. It's provoking this discussion, and thats what a good book should do.
Re:Non-sequitur (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider further that General Groves selected him to run the Manhattan Project even though he had all the following black marks against him: he was only 38, and would have to be in charge of many people senior to him; he was a theoretical physicist, and would have to be in charge of applied scientists; he had no administrative experience whatever; he had no mechanical aptitude at all and was helpless with the simplest machine; he was a leftist and all his friends were open Communists; and oh yeah, he tried to murder his graduate advisor. The lesson: it's really important to be a good interview.
Re:Well, statistics says this must be true, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:1, Interesting)
For whatever reason Bill Gates fixated on computer programming. You might even say that he decided to study computer programming.
That may be so... but as the book points out, at the time Bill Gates was learning to program there was very little opportunity for a teenager to learn programming. Bill Gates was fortunate to have virtually unlimited access to computers, access few others had.
Don't prop up failed companies (Score:5, Interesting)
I totally agree with you. If a business and its shareholders want to pay their executives 1 hojillion dollars, it's their decision. The executives are an investment, like any other. If the executives bring enough income to the company to justify it, the company wins, and if they don't, the company loses. Or fires them.
If the company is foolish enough to pay the execs based on short-term gains which ultimately cost them billions, the company loses. Everything works itself out.
What breaks this system is when the company makes horrific decisions and the taxpayers bail them out. Now we're paying the huge salaries and there's no penalty for bad investment. Guess what that creates? (Hint: not "valuable jobs and products.")
Re:Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
It just happened that that the skills he honed over those 10,000 hours happened to turn into something valuable. And then Microsoft got a series of lucky breaks. The weather happened to be good on the day that IBM wanted to talk to Intergalactic Digital Research, so the founder was out flying his plane. Had it been a rainy day, Gates' company might have made it through the 1980s, or it might have foundered or been bought out. It certainly wouldn't have been the powerhouse that it is.
Why is it that some musicians, after 10,000 hours of practice, are struggling with their day jobs, and others are mega-stars?
Re:Bill Gates as an example (Score:4, Interesting)
It is likely that had Bill Gates not sold BASIC to MITS in the beginning [wikipedia.org], he wouldn't have been able to succeed at the other stuff he did. Remember, he wrote the Altair's BASIC demonstration by hand on punch tape without being able to verify it - and it worked. (At least, that's what Pirates of Silicon Valley [imdb.com] would have us believe.)
That is something that takes skill, and I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the role of his 10,000 hours in developing that skill.
Hopemongering, Not really scientific (Score:1, Interesting)
The author of this book is playing into everyone's hope that you can control your life.
But as most psychologists know, genes account for most of the variations in human nature, not experience.
Here are just a few of the papers for those who want academic proof.
They show that intelligence, personality, temperament, occupational, and leisure time interests are mostly influenced by your genes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3397862
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7750369
http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~dmoore/psych199s03articles/Bouchard.pdf
Re:Rice paddy paradox (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullshit. And that's coming from an atheist.
You'd better be ready to tell me how and why Kenneth Miller, just to name one, is "incapable of thinking for himself" due to his religions belief.
Feynman (Score:2, Interesting)
Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest
Wow, this is what I've always felt. Gotta love the Feynman.
Re:Sounds like Attribution Theory (Score:3, Interesting)
It can also go the other way. I come from a rich family, therefore I don't have to work hard, since I will be well off anyway.
A lot of rich families pamper their children, and don't instill in the them the same need to work. Bill got away with it, I think, because of a natural interest in computers, that a lot of us here have.
Re:communism doesn't work in large groups (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone else pointed out to you, it is really an existential question. What is the "purpose" of life? Is "hard work and sacrifice and pain for uncertain rewards largely based on random chance" the only way to live? Is an attempt to reduce the "risk/reward" ratio for everyone an evil deed? Or is life supposed to be like a Las Vegas casino where nearly everyone loses so that some extremely rare random person can win the "jackpot" somehow superior? (and the person in question promptly going on TV to extol his/her "skill" and "perseverance" at pulling the machine's lever to a chorus of adoring true-believers) Is co-operation the superior way of an sentient species, or vicious competition to the death for scraps in an endless winner-takes-almost-all game?
Your excuses would sound more sincere if this was the first "boom" ever caused by the systemic instability of the "winner-takes-most" society. Or a second... or maybe a third ... but this has been going on so long that some dusty 19th century books are still around excusing busts of that time ... equally insincerely. And going further back one can see more busts and booms and wars and famines and what not caused by various different incarnations of greed-and-power based societies. It is endless really. I do think that sentient beings should be able to do much better than this.