Outliers | The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. When examining the lives of the remarkable among us-the skilled, the talented, and the driven – it turns out that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like? What kind of personalities they have? How intelligent they are? What kind of lifestyles they have? What special talents they might have been born with? And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.

In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/ entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same. Our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness. In Outliers, you will be convinced that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. 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. It allows them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.

It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.

We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid? This is not a book about tall trees. It’s a book about forest.

The sociologist Robert Merton famously called a phenomenon as the “Matthew Effect” after the New Testament verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” 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. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice.

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger. And that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still-and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.

Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.

Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists 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. The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

Successful people have been given lots of opportunities throughout their lifetime. For example, opportunity number one for Bill Gates was that he got sent to Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968? Opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay for the school’s computer fees. Number three was that, when that money ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed, which happened to need someone to check its code on the weekends, and which also happened not to care if weekends turned into weeknights.

#4 was that Gates just happened to find out about lSI, and lSI just happened to need someone to work on its payroll software. Number five was that Gates happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington. #6 was that the university happened to have free computer time between three and six in the morning. Number seven was that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke. #8 was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem happened to be two high school kids. And number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away, writing code.

By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past ten thousand hours.

What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

The poorer children were often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau’s words, the middle-class children learn a sense of “entitlement.”

It was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences.” They knew the rules. “Even in fourth grade, middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages. They made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires.”

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would be lawyer, being born in the early 1930S was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.

Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industry-as cutthroat and grim as it was-was that it allowed people like the Borgenichts, just off the boat, to find something meaningful to do as well. When Louis Borgenicht came home after first seeing that child’s apron, he danced a jig. He hadn’t sold anything yet. He was still penniless and desperate, and he knew that to make something of his idea was going to require years of backbreaking labor. But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him.

Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.

“No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

The historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs, and the differences are striking. “If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it” is a typical Russian proverb. That’s the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system, where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work. On the other hand, Chinese proverbs are striking in their belief that “hard work, shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense.”

Here are some of the things that penniless peasants would say to one another as they worked three thousand hours a year in the baking heat and humidity of Chinese rice paddies:

– “No food without blood and sweat.”
– “Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren’t busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?”
– “In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.”
– “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.”
– “Useless to ask about the crops, it all depends on hard work and fertilizer.”
– “If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”
And, most telling of all: “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder. A mind must be cultivated. But not too much, lest it be exhausted. And what was the remedy for the dangers of exhaustion? The long summer vacation – a peculiar and distinctive American legacy that has had profound consequences for the learning patterns of the students of the present day.

Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. 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. For hockey and soccer players born in January, it’s a better shot at making the all-star team, 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. Joe Flom and the founders of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks.

They were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity, which allowed them to practice takeover law for twenty years before the rest of the legal world caught on. And what Korean Air did, when it finally turned its operations around, was give its pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural legacy.

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 timesharing 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. If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars. Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession. The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.