Dahlia Bock

by Malcolm Gladwell

The Review

We often think that successful people were born with the successful gene; it is due to innate talent that they do whatever they do with such triumph; the stars are lined up perfectly for them all the time; they’re outstanding individuals who got this far all on their own. Conventional wisdom has drilled our minds to ignore the other reasons to which outliers owe their success to.

Your birth date matters. Who would think that most of the star hockey players in Canada have one thing in common (besides being great hockey players)? They were all born in the first 3 months of the year. Why would that even matter? The explanation is simple: the eligibility sutoff for age-class hockey in Canada is January 1.

A boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year – and at that age, in preadolescence, a 12-month gap in ages represents an enormous difference in phyrical maturity.“

Imagine that? So that means that if Canada had 2 cutoff dates in a year, they would have had twice the number of star hockey players!

Practice does make perfect. What do Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Mozart and The Beatles all have in common? (Except the fact that they are famous people in their own right). They spent many, many years perfecting their craft. Bill Joy started programming in earnest in his sophomore year, and never stopped even through the summers, day and night, 8 to 10 hours a day. When The Beatles started out playing together in Hamburg, they were doing it for 8 straight hours, 7 days a week. They made 5 trips back to Hamburg and in total played there for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they got their first break in 1964, they had already performed live an estimated 1200 hours! Bill Gates started programming in 8th grade and by the time he dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to start a company, he’d been programming practically nonstop for 7 years!

Genius, schmenius. Being successful is a lot more than IQ. It’s about knowing how to use your intelligence to move around situations, people, environments to your benefit.

Your family, cultural legacy and identity plays a big part in your success.

How do rice paddies explain the Asian proclivity for math? Just that Asians are more inclined to spend a longer time solving a problem than anyone else. This goes with the Chinese proverb that says,

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

Persistence seems to be more of an Asian trait.

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.

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. … 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?

I think the following excerpt does justice to summarizing the book:

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.

What I Liked

Malcolm Gladwell is gifted in the art of combining different puzzles together and making sense of it in a way no one else would. This book is an easy read, like his previous books. I appreciate how he brings together many examples to prove his point. That’s one of the best things I like about this book, the stories.

What I Didn’t Like

My only complaint about the book is that Gladwell tends to repeat himself a lot, referring back to previous examples very many times throughout the book. I guess it’s a way to drive home a point, but after 2 or 3 times, I think the reader does really get it. He also does a similar thing in his other book, The Tipping Point.