The right place, time, and mindset

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, is an expert at squeezing interesting facts and surprising conclusions out of daily life. His latest effort, Outliers, is engaging and informative, packed with facts and ideas that could help the reader get promoted or raise smart kids or at least pass a happy lunch hour.

Gladwell wants to explore success. Specifically, he's interested in the types of success stories we often hear--rags-to-riches fairy tales--and what's really driving the achievement. The bottom line (although reading the details and examples in the book is well worth it) is that chance, opportunity, and cultural effects play a much bigger role than might be expected.

At the beginning of the book, there are a series of examples of how an arbitrary cutoff date for kids' activities (hockey, soccer, even school) can have lasting effects. Children born right after the cutoff are bigger and more mature than the younger ones. Their reading skills are likely to be better, and they're probably bigger and faster on the rink or field. They get picked for "all-star" activities of various sorts, get more practice time as a result, and are set up for better results whether or not they're innately stars. If it's not this effect, something else (like sheer enthusiasm) may drive people to really apply themselves to a subject. There's a sort of magical threshold around ten thousand hours at some task, and people from violin prodigies to Bill Gates get this level of practice before making it. Practice may not make perfect, but it certainly makes a whole lot better.

Another interesting thread relates to confidence and hierarchy. Parents who encourage their children to question authority are teaching the sort of assertiveness that will help them seize opportunities later in life. I was struck by the story of a boy going to the doctor who "is used to being treated with respect" and behaves "much as he does with his parents--he reasons, negotiates, and jokes with equal ease." This ability to deal well with adults and not be cowed by higher-ups is one that's served me well in the past. (Of course, the end of this road is arrogance, and things start backfiring if you go too far.) Gladwell's later discussion of cultural senses of authority and their relationship to airline crashes goes along the same lines.

I hope to apply another of the author's observations in the future. Some data, when tabulated one way, purports to show the "achievement gap" between the lower and upper classes. However, when it's rearranged to show the difference in test scores on either side of a student's summer break, we see that the poorer kids learn about as much (sometimes more) than the rich kids during the school year, but get basically nothing skill-wise out of their summer vacations while the better-off students pile on the score points via summer break enrichment. Even if they aren't off at fancy camps, there are probably books and talkative adults around the house. Children are quite prepared to be sponges, so it's their caretakers' responsibility to give them the academic water they need at all times.

Reading this book probably won't make me more of a success. I'm already keenly aware that I need to seize opportunities when they arise and be my own advocate. That's something I want to pass on to my children. On the other hand, I'm never going to have the chance to go back to childhood to spend ten thousand hours becoming a pianist or computer programmer. Maybe my kids will. Really, the only thing I've spent that much time on is reading--and I'm a darn good reader! There might be something to all this.

Rating: ***1/2