Outlier

Outliers is Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book. Just like his previous two books, The Tipping Point and Blink, this one is also an international bestseller. Gladwell is a good story teller. I found myself often absorbed in his stories. And those stories as he told them are certainly the best part of his books.  His text flows and it appears to require very little mental effort to go through. This of course doesn’t mean that he has no depth or has no thought-provoking points.

The subtitle of the book is “The story of success”. Gladwell wanted to figure out what factors determine or at least account for the wild success of the top achievers. Those people stand out so far from the rest of us, therefore the title Outliers. 

Many of us in this country wanted to believe that the extremely successful people are largely self-made. They succeed because they are intelligent, resilient, and they work hard. Gladwell wanted to convince us that factors outside each individual play far bigger roles than people usually give them credit for. He said, “It is not the brightest who succeed… Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” He told us story after story to show that many successes can be explained by the factors such as family background, cultural background, class, birth month, birth year, birth place, generation, historical background in terms of technology development, etc.

The book is divided in two parts, dealing with the role opportunity and legacy play in the success of outliers, respectively. In the first part, Gladwell used many stories to show that “success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world.” In the second part, Gladwell showed that “the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role.”

Gladwell observed, “People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.” 

Gladwell did agree that people who reached the top worked hard and they had a way to make sense of the world and of themselves that made them very productive in using their own talents and their external resources. However, he pointed out that the seed or inspiration that initially nudged them to consistently work in their chosen fields for extended period of time (say, 10,000 hours high quality work) is usually outside them. He talked about the so-called Mathew effect, that is, the accumulated advantage a person can have that amplifies any trivial initial differences. In simply words, if a person shows any special talent or interest in a domain at the very young age, no matter how unimpressive that special talent is to begin with, this person is likely to get more opportunity to train further in the domain, get better as a result, and therefore gain access to higher quality instructions or better further development opportunities. Gladwell used the stories of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joy to show that they can’t get where they are without the extraordinary opportunities they had for practice. He said, “These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of the society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” 

One of the examples Gladwell used to discuss the effect of cultural legacy is the study of plane crash. Gladwell told us, “The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors.” “The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.”  Interestingly, there is one anomaly.  “In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split the flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the “flying seat.””, presumably when the first office made a mistake, it would be easy for the captain to remind him or correct him.  A Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede came up with something called Power Distance Index (PDI) to measure people’s attitude toward hierarchy and authority. Different cultures have different PDIs. The ranking of PDIs by country has a very close match with the ranking of plane crashes by country. In other words, it is very difficult for the first officers from the cultural background of valuing and respecting authority to speak up clearly and assertively even when something was seriously wrong.

As a parent, two studies Gladwell mentioned surprised me and made me aware of my responsibility. The first one was conducted by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman identified a large group of children with high IQs (average 140 and range 200) in California. He thought those children would become top achievers in their chosen fields. He kept track of their lives over many years and found the results very disappointing. As a group, those people didn't do better than a random sample from the population. Within the group, when he looked at the top 20% and the bottom 20%, the only factor that mattered is their family background. The top group overwhelmingly came from the upper or middle class. The second study was done by psychologist Annette Lareau. She was interested in how class, race, and family life affect childhood and create inequality in child development.  According to her, “there are only two parenting philosophies and they almost perfectly divide along class lines.” Poor parents usually don't monitor their children's free time. They “tend to follow…a strategy of ‘accomplishment of natural growth.’” The advantage for children growing up in that kind of environment is that they know how to use them free time creatively and “had a well-developed sense of independence”. The middle class parents have the "concerted cultivation" style as she called it. That is, they were heavily involved in their children's free time. Two aspects of this involvement are worth noticing. The first one is that the middle class children have intensive schedule of many enrichment activities. These activities give them exposure “to a constantly shifting set of experiences” and provide them with opportunities to learn “team work and how to cope in highly structured settings.” They learn “how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up” when they need to. This concerted cultivation gives those children enormous practical advantages. The second aspect is that “middle class parents talked things through with their children, reasoning with them. They didn’t just issue commands. They expected their children to talk back to them, to negotiate, to question adults in positions of authority.” They also asked their children about other people they have regular contact with outside their homes, such as their teachers, coaches, and teammates.

Like many studies about success prior to this one, the methodology used in this book is retrospective, that is, to identify the outliers and trace back to figure out what factors were important in the formative years. Also in many of the stories told, the causal relationship hinted between a person’s success and the factors affected that is too clean and clear cut. Gladwell often used one story to demonstrate one important influence factor. He did consider all the important factors for any single case. It is certainly a very interesting study. However, I don’t believe those factors mentioned have predictive power. We can’t randomly grab a child from the crowd, just to observe where he/she stands in terms of his/her external environment and predict whether he/she will succeed, how successful he/she will be, and in what field. What I want to say is that life is very complex. There are countless ways for a person to do well, to succeed. For a person to appear disadvantaged from one perspective, it doesn’t mean this person is still disadvantaged from a different perspective. It is important for us to be aware of the influence of those external factors when we raise children, teach or mentor young people, and even when we develop ourselves. However, it is equally important to think about all the resources, gifts, and talents we have been given. The essential question for each and every one of us is to ask how we could best use what we already have internally and how we could arrange our external environment if at all possible to achieve goals that inspire us, given the ultimate limiting factors, our energy and our remaining time on earth.