An Outlier among Equals: A Review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers – The Story of Success

Excerpt
The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. 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. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen year old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year -old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world 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. The world could be so much richer than the world we settled for.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers- the Story of Success” continues with his innovative genre of finding patterns behind everyday phenomena in our lives. Like his earlier books Blink and The Tipping Point, he explores and provides insights in a genre he has arguably pioneered. He has an innate talent for picking a trend in the tangled heap of human behaviour and actions, finding reasons behind their manifestation and then revealing his findings in such a manner that it captivates the reader through its lucid, coherent, chatty prose.

Outliers is an engaging, informative look at how and why some people have successful lives, and why others fall short of living up to their promise. Gladwell examines patterns of how and why people achieve their goals and manage to create a life filled with extraordinary success, both financially and personally. His theory attempts to demystify the commonly accepted norm that genius is a natural phenomenon that can continue its rise on its own, unabated by any external factor.

He asks a simple yet searching question: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while there are those that never reach their potential? Gladwell believes that genius doesn’t arise in isolation, propelled by talent and brilliance alone. A life of genius is the result of an accumulation of advantage gained by the individual through favourable cultural legacies, hidden advantages, the happenstance of being born in an era of unique economic opportunities, historical legacies, financial health etc that helps them make sense of the world in a way that others cannot. Examining the lives of outliers from Mozart to Bill Gates, he builds a convincing case of how successful people rise on a tide of advantages, “some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky.”

Outliers is a very readable book and Gladwell has written it in an engaging and coherent manner, his theories shorn of jargon and convoluted prose. He poses some intriguing cases like why most pro hockey players are born in January, how many hours of practice it takes to master a skill, why the descendents of Jewish immigrant garment workers became the most powerful lawyers in New York in the 20th century, how the dynamics of the culture which pilots come from impacts their crash record, how a centuries-old culture of rice farming helps Asian kids master math and how his own family in Jamaica rose to prosperity because of certain circumstances that aided their efforts. Underlying these cases is Gladwell’s basic theory that explores the benefits that accrue to individuals because of social advantages of the colour of skin, the time of our births and various other cultural idiosyncrasies. He provokes conversations about the complex ways privilege manifests in our culture.

Gladwell writes that success has a lot to do with one’s level of practical or emotional intelligence, which in turn is shaped by the circumstances of one’s growing up, amongst other things. He feels that IQ as a determining factor is relevant only up to a certain level. For instance, he feels that to become a successful scientist one cannot have an IQ below a particular level. However beyond a high IQ level of 140 or 150, it is seldom the differentiating factor between a successful genius and an ordinary person. He uses the cases of Charles Langan and Albert Einstein to prove his point. While Einstein had an IQ of 150, Langan surprises everyone with an IQ score of 195. Does that mean Langan is much smarter than Einstein, Gladwell asks. He then goes on to write why Einstein became what we know him, while Langan is not what his IQ is supposed to project him, though both people have innate qualities of a genius.

He also uses the example of Nobel laureates coming from unknown schools as often as Ivy League schools. At this level of mastery IQ is no longer a factor. Success has a lot to do with the level of practical intelligence one possesses and a persistent willingness to put in 10,000 hours of practice to be an expert in a field.

Interestingly, Gladwell infers that when there is economic recession, people may stop having children for fear of being unable to provide for them. However, this may be the best time to have children, because there are few other children vying for things such as classrooms, school sports teams, professors’ attention, and jobs after graduation. There are also more children a decade behind them (those born after the recession period is over) who will provide the demand for the goods and services the older children will provide when they are into their jobs, which in turn means that as adults they will succeed in a booming economy.

It is an interesting explanation of America’s success with the baby boom generation and may provide an insight into India’s growth after the socialism era. In practice, such a theory can be a solid explanation in a developed world where a drop in demographic patterns can skew the relative availability of facilities to the benefit of society. However, in a developing world like India, there may be other factors at play, and therefore to expect that a person born in an age of recession will derive certain advantages may not be the sole explanation, though it can be used in conjunction with other factors. The unfavorably skewed ratio of population density to facilities available in a country like India may render it impossible for any advantage to be derived by someone born in an era of lesser children, since the effect of change in the aforementioned ratio will be minimal. There will always be fierce competition for resources in such a place where dysfunctional elements like non availability of facilities, distance of residence from school, below par educational facilities, inconsistent state education policies, uneven standards of teaching and corrupt practices also determine success or lack of it.

One area that Gladwell doesn’t write convincingly enough is when he explains that rice farming is a reason why Asian children do better in math. His other explanation that the most commonly used Asian languages use a monosyllabic, ordered system to describe numbers, unlike English may provoke curiosity and an interesting debate amongst those who agree and those who don’t. It may also provoke questions whether Sanskrit is a better language system to follow while doing math than other languages.

In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years. Though it serves up interesting detais about how the cropping takes place and the work associated with it, Gladwell fails to prove that it can explain math prowess as a universal theory. On the positive side though this observation may again just help open up a debate amongst intellectuals on whether his theory holds good for India, and to what extent is it true or untrue.

A debatable aspect in the book is that Gladwell’s conclusions are built almost exclusively on the findings of sociologists, economists and historians. He picks verified data to support his cases and prove his point, which is fine. However does his observation prove to be true enough in many cases so as to substantiate his claims of disproving widely held beliefs in each case is a point worth thinking. Are the samples he examines truly representative of the population’s behaviour is a statistical debate that will always be under scrutiny. Though real life is seldom as neat as Malcom Gladwell’s theories, what he does is rip apart our conservative beliefs and provokes us to think whether what we know is true.

Conclusion

There have been a few books in this genre in recent times. Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin is a book that has certain things in common with Outliers. While Colvin puts greater emphasis on practice and hard work, Gladwell emphasizes on happenstances, culture and luck more. Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist by Dean Keith Simonton is a book which focuses specifically on success in science. Simonton provides support for Gladwell’s ideas, and he also argues that luck is an important factor in scientific creativity, while also recognizing the supporting roles of genius. Logic and knowledge, he also believes comes from hard work, maybe referring to the need for doing 10,000 hours in training. There is also The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that also argues about the role of positive luck in achieving success, while a negative slice of luck and circumstance has the opposite, dark effect.

Gladwell remains highly saleable and acceptable despite the fact that what he writes about is nothing new. We all know how hard work decides success. We aren’t new to the thought that genius is more perspiration than inspiration. We also are aware how a talent can be moulded to elevate one’s abilities to another level.

Some people have criticized his book for lack of originality, but Gladwell deserves credit and success for portraying these fascinating thoughts to a large general audience in a gripping and compelling way. Gladwell simplifies difficult theories in a typical matter-of-fact style of his. He puts forth arguments that challenge widely held norms in a manner that is smooth, lucid, coherent and for the most part, convincing.

The one compelling strength of Gladwell’s book, and Malcolm unfailingly proves it every time, is that he’s a wonderful writer, an outlier in his ability for storytelling.,,,,