THE author of the bestseller, Blink, has come up with yet another brilliant topic. Outliers, gives us the answer to how some people succeed far more than others. And the answer shatters the notion that some people rise from nothing.
The unusual title, Outlier, refers both to something that is situated away from a main body or to a statistical observation which is clearly different from the others of the sample. The book, easily read and highly entertaining, introduces us to an inventive theory based on sharp observations.
In the very first pages, we are asked to examine a hockey player’s roster and see if we can find anything revealing. The only interesting detail concerns the incredible number of players born in January, February, and March. The reason for this is simple: The eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is Jan. 1.
A boy who turns 10 could be playing with someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year and at that age, a 12-month gap in age denotes a big difference in physical maturity.
Incidentally, Canada is crazy about ice-hockey, so coaches start selecting players for the all-star teams, at the age of nine or ten, and they prefer boys who show the benefit of extra months of maturity. Once a young player is chosen, he benefits from better coaching and thanks to that extra practice, he is in a better position to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues.
European soccer is also organized like hockey, in England, for example, the eligibility date is Sept. 1, so that a majority of players are born between June and August.
The importance of birthday dates in the realm of sports proves that success is not due to talent only but to an opportunity that players did not even deserve or earn. The fact that certain players are born in the right month gives them the best coaching and the possibility to practice a lot. These advantages will eventually help them become professional players:
“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. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention… Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage.’”
We have seen the role opportunity plays in success but what about talent and does ‘innate talent’ exist? According to the author, the closer we look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play. All expert studies show that the minimum level of practice required to become a world-class expert in anything is ten thousand hours of practice:
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players… this number comes up again and again,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin.
Mozart, the child prodigy, didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than 20 years, in other words he had totaled more than 10,000 hours of practice.
Ten thousand hours, is not only a huge amount of time but it’s also practically impossible for a child to practice for so many hours alone. A child needs parents to encourage and support him. And to keep up practicing, one also needs money because working part-time to make ends meet, there won’t be enough time to practice.
Bill Gates is a typical example of someone who succeeded through a combination of ability, opportunity and cultural legacies. The son of a wealthy lawyer, he was sent to a private school which had not only set up a computer club but also had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. This gave him the opportunity to work on a computer for thousands of hours from eight grade through the end of high school. Another huge opportunity was that he and Paul Allen were given the chance to conduct a programming job for a technology company which had just a contact to set up a computer system at the huge Bonneville Power station in southern Washington State. When Bill Gates decided to drop out of Harvard after his second year to set up his own software company, he had been practicing programming for more than ten thousand hours.
In the second part of the book, Gladwell shows us how the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our parents can impact the way we succeed in the world. Chinese children are traditionally better at math. The regularity of their numbers helps them memorize more numbers and do well in calculus.
According to the author, we should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work. Singapore, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan top the list. They are the kind of places where, for hundred of years, penniless peasants, have slaved away in the rice paddies 3,000 hours a year.
Outliers tells us that if success follows a predictable course, it is not the most intelligent who succeed:
“Outliers are those who have been given opportunities and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star tea. For the Beatles it was Hamburg. For Bill Gates, the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success, with a society that provides opportunities for all,” concludes Malcom Glad well.
