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Key insights from
Outliers: The Story of Success
By
Malcolm Gladwell
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What you’ll learn
What does Bill Gates’ story hold in common with the
Beatles’? Why are so many professional hockey players born between January
and March? Why do Asians tend to excel in math? In his examination of
success stories, Malcolm Gladwell maintains that the way we understand the
accomplishments of exceptional individuals often overlooks factors critical
to their achievements. Applying a seemingly peculiar metric, Gladwell aims
to debunk the popular narratives that assume success is due primarily to
one’s individual talent and tenacity. The broader contexts of unique
opportunities and advantages better explain the success of these remarkable
individuals, or outliers.
Read on for key insights from Outliers.
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1. We need to
rethink how we understand the path to greatness.
In the late 1800s, a group of peasants from Roseto
Valfortore, Italy came to the United States and settled in a small town in
Pennsylvania. After the initial group came, the Rosetans immigrated in
droves, all settling in the same Pennsylvanian town that they called
Roseto. It became a thriving township, complete with parish, schools,
parks, convent, shops and factories.
A physician named Steward Wolf, intrigued by reports of
unusually good heart health in the town, wanted to study the matter
further. Wolf found that death rates from heart attacks in Roseto were
about half of the United States’ average. Heart attacks and heart disease
in men under fifty-five were almost unheard of. At that time—the
1950s—heart disease was the most common cause of death among men under
sixty-five; so these findings were staggering.
What accounted for the town’s phenomenal heart health? Wolf
and his colleague Bruhn ruled out diet, exercise, genetics, and geography
as explanations, and eventually concluded that it was the culture: the
friendliness among neighbors, the stable, inter-generational family unit,
the Catholic religion as a homogenizer and an egalitarian atmosphere in
which women were respected and the poor were cared for. Simply put,
Roseto’s heart health was the result of robust, healthy community.
This finding was perplexing and unsatisfactory to many in
the scientific community, but the resistance represented the growth pains
of a paradigm shift. The new theory that a community’s ethos has a profound
impact on health eventually held. Just as Wolf started a paradigm shift in
the field of health, the aim of this book is to catalyze a shift in our thinking
about the topic of success.
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2. Arbitrary
cut-off dates for sports and schools put some children at a disadvantage.
There is something very flawed about how we understand
outliers. An examination of a variety of success stories in different
fields will show that the answer to the question, “What is successful
person X like?” is a far less illuminating than “Where is successful person
X from?” While the rags-to-riches, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps
sagas pluck the heartstrings, they are overly individualistic and fail to
provide crucial context.
Hockey is a perfect example. Psychologist Roger Barnsley
stumbled upon a strange phenomenon in the mid-1980s: He discovered that an
overwhelming number of professional hockey players have birthdays in
January, February, and March. He investigated other professional teams and
even younger elite leagues and found the same pattern.
Barnsley realized that this was because the cutoff date for
determining age groupings in Canadian hockey is January 1. This matters
because a five-year-old born January 2 has more time to mature physically
than a five-year-old born November 2. Those eleven months are critical,
especially at an early age, where development is so rapid. Scouts select
the stronger, physically mature kids and direct them to more competitive
channels, where their skills are developed at an even faster rate. This is
called “accumulative advantage.” Because of an arbitrary cut-off date, many
kids have a significant obstacle to overcome, while others enjoy a distinct
advantage.
This has been the pattern in athletics, more generally, and
in education, too. Researchers found that when they tested fourth graders
across the globe, the oldest students scored considerably higher than their
younger classmates on the TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science
Study). Another study identified a similar trend among United States college
students.
Sociologist Robert Merton refers to this pattern as the
Matthew Effect, a reference to the Gospel of Matthew 25:29: “For whoever
has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not
have, even what they have will be taken from them.” In athletics and
education, the outliers were not born as such; they just got a head start.
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3. No one became
an expert without working at their skill for at least 10,000 hours.
Bill Joy is known today as a computer programmer extraordinaire,
a Silicon Valley legend. He changed his major to computer science when he
saw University of Michigan’s state-of-the-art Computer Center, a prototype
developed just a few years before he enrolled in 1971. Joy spent day and
night at the center programming. He went on to graduate studies at
Berkeley, where he stunned his professors during his oral with his ability
to develop and recite a complex programming algorithm on the spot. He
rewrote computer languages for UNIX and Java, codes that are still used to
this day. Through hard work and determination, Joy achieved monumental
success in the field of computer programming. The end.
This is how biographers usually tell the story. It is the
same type of narrative we hear about hockey and soccer stars. But it fails
to mention the advantages and opportunities and historical moments that
serendipitously—but also critically—came together to catalyze such success.
Achievement is talent plus preparation. Researchers are
coming to the conclusion that preparation is the more essential of the two.
A study of violinists at the Academy of Music in Berlin found a wide
discrepancy in time devoted to practice over the lifetime of the musicians.
The academy’s best violinists averaged 10,000 hours of practice; the good
musicians, 8,000; for mediocre violinists, 4,000. For musicians, chess
masters, and professional athletes, the number that researchers have landed
on as the threshold for expertise is 10,000 hours, a colossal amount of
time.
The 10,000-Hour Rule makes sense of Bill Joy’s success. On
top of being a math whiz and a kid with an insatiable appetite for
learning, he also put in the hours. In an interview, Joy made a quick
mental calculation of the hours he’d spent programming. By his own
reckoning—which we can consider fairly reliable—he was in the ballpark of
10,000 hours.
This theory also makes sense of the trajectories of
world-renowned rock stars and a genius business tycoon. The Beatles got
their start playing eight hours a day, seven days a week at a strip club in
Hamburg, Germany. During the early 1960s, the four young Liverpudlians had
played an estimated (and unheard of) 1,200 shows—and their career as a
group was just beginning!
Bill Gates had his own Hamburg experience when his elite
private school’s Mother’s Club used rummage sale funds to buy a computer
terminal for the school during his eighth grade year. He programmed at the
school, tested company software in exchange for programming time, and
looked for any opportunity to practice, day or night.
What really distinguishes these individuals is not their
remarkable talent and grit, but the tremendous opportunities. Why does a
list of the top seventy-five wealthiest people of all time contain
Americans all born within a nine-year time frame (1831-40)? It was at this
time that Wall Street began and industrial manufacturing took off, and
these nine Americans identified opportunities within those developments
that led to gigantic financial gains.
So how old you are at a critical time and place in history makes
a big difference. This is true in the computer science realm. Ideally, you
wanted to be twenty or twenty-one, or born between 1954-55: old enough to
join the personal computer revolution that began in 1975, but young enough
to avoid getting stuck with IBM making outmoded mainframes. Outlandish?
It seems more plausible when we see the birth years of the technology
gurus:
Bill Gates: October, 1955
Paul Allen: January, 1953
Steve Ballmer, March, 1956
Steve Jobs: February, 1955
Eric Schmidt: April, 1955
Bill Joy: November, 1954
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4. Genius is not
everything—emotional and practical intelligence are also critical to
success.
The man who invented the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test was
Lewis Terman, a professor of psychology at Stanford. His area of expertise
was quantifying intelligence. In the early 1920s, he decided to dedicate
his life to the study of singularly gifted kids. After a thorough vetting
process through several rounds of tests given to elementary students in
California, Terman selected a group of 1,470 children who had done
brilliantly on the tests. The average IQ among the children was 140, and
some had IQs as high as 200. He affectionately referred to these children
as the “Termites,” and he dedicated his life to tracking their progress and
life events.
IQ matters, clearly, but only up to a point. An IQ of 100 is
average and above 145 is considered genius, but an adult with an IQ of 180
is not more or less like to win a Nobel Prize than another adult with an IQ
of 140. It is similar to basketball: The difference between five feet and
six feet is much more significant than between seven feet and eight feet.
After you are, say, six foot, six inches, you are “tall enough.” Similarly,
beyond 120, there is not a significant measurable advantage that a higher
IQ score brings. People with IQs of 125, 135, and 165 are all “smart
enough.” A look at the universities that Nobel Laureates attended will show
this to be the case—they did not all attend Ivy Leagues, but they went to
schools that were “good enough.”
Another limitation of the IQ metric is its failure to
consider the more creative, imaginative dimensions of human intelligence.
In contrast to convergence tests like IQ and Raven’s Progressive Matrices,
which test one’s ability to “converge” on the correct answer, divergence tests
draw out the subjective, creative mental processes. Not just objective
intelligence, but creativity and the ability to think beyond common
categories are qualities needed to create the kind of groundbreaking,
pioneering work that warrant a Nobel Prize.
In a related study, Terman examined the records of 730
of his Termites and divided them into three groups: the success stories,
the average, and the unsatisfactory—or Group A, B, and C, respectively. He
found that the most significant factor that separated the As from the Cs
was family background. The vast majority of students from Group A were from
stable, middle or upper class families with educated parents, whereas many
from Group C had parents who were poor and did not make it to eighth grade.
This powerfully showed that even brilliant individuals have a difficult
time achieving success if they are bereft of the web of opportunities and
advantages that a stable, educated family background brings.
For the aforementioned reasons, it is clear that Terman was
mistaken in his understanding of the factors that lead to success. He
overemphasized the objective, intellectual dimension of human existence
when he gathered his Termites. Most of his Termites went on to live fairly
conventional lives, earning decent incomes and holding respectable posts,
but there were no Nobel Prize winners with earth-shattering ideas as he had
hoped. Terman himself concluded that the link between intellect and
achievement is not nearly as strong as he had supposed.
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5. Cultures that
reinforce the value of hard work produce better students.
Farming in the West is “mechanically oriented,” meaning
bigger, more efficient machines yield better results. Asian agriculture, by
contrast, is “skill oriented.” Given the limitations in land and capital
for most Asians, long hours spent cultivating small plots as skillfully and
efficiently as possible are the key to large harvests. Unlike other
pre-modern lifestyles that are not as labor-intensive, rice farming in Asia
often requires ten to twenty times more labor than a wheat field of the
same size.
As with the Eastern European Jewish immigrants in New York
working in the garment industry, Asian rice farmers are engaged in an
occupation that meets the commonly accepted criteria for meaningful work:
1) the connection between hard work and reward is strong, 2) it is more
than sufficiently complex, and 3) it is autonomous.
If we compare the folk proverbs of Russia and China, we find
that the Russian peasants tended toward a passive, pessimistic fatalism,
whereas the Chinese idioms were affirmations of the blood, sweat, and tears
required for success. For example, “No one who can rise before dawn three
hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” Hard work as
critical to success is deeply ingrained in the Chinese psyche. The cultural
patterns developed through attention to precision and unrelenting diligence
in the rice paddies serves Asians well in many realms of life, but
particularly in mathematics.
The average American high school student will spend about
two minutes on a difficult problem before giving up on it. According to
Berkley professor of mathematics Alan Schoenfeld, it is through persistence
that one achieves breakthrough moments in learning math. Attitude is far
more critical than aptitude.
We see this doggedness—and lack thereof—in the results of
the TIMSS (Trends in International Math and Science Study) questionnaire.
University of Pennsylvania professor Erling Boe found that he could
accurately predict a country’s success based on how completely they filled
out the grueling preliminary 120-item questionnaire. While many students
around the world leave twenty or more questions unanswered, it should not
surprise that Asians tend to fill out the surveys completely. Those countries
with cultural legacies of single-minded determination, animated by sayings
about rising before dawn everyday—those are cultures that are
willing to complete exhausting surveys. They are also the same that excel
in mathematics.
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6. Sometimes
cultural legacies have to be set aside for a higher good.
KIPP Academy began as an educational experiment in the
mid-1990s. It is a middle school in the heart of one of the poorest areas
of New York, the South Bronx. In just a decade, it became one of the most
coveted programs in New York. Good teachers and robust curriculum do not
adequately explain the school’s success. The attention KIPP has paid to the
failing cultural convention of long summer vacations better explains their
success.
This failed cultural legacy has its origins in the
nineteenth century, when American public schools were little more than a
smattering of overcrowded buildings in cities and rural schoolhouses that
remained empty during planting and harvest seasons. Reformers envisioned a
more comprehensive system. One aspect that the reformers were adamant about
was a period of rest to ensure the students would not receive too much
schooling. From this philosophy came the long summer vacations with which
we are familiar today. This approach was shaped by wheat and cornfields
that must lie fallow every so often, a philosophy much less likely to
originate in Asia’s rice paddy fields, where diligent work and constant
attention are needed.
Long summer vacations has been often overlooked in
discussions of the achievement gap that separates low class students from
middle and upper class students. When we consider that cumulative
achievement is pretty even across the social classes (that is, the gains
made over the course of the school year) and that reading score gains are
significantly higher among upper class than lower class students by the end
of summer each year, we can conclude that the summer is the season of
unlearning what was learned. Compare the United States’ 180 days of school
to South Korea’s 220 days or Japan’s 243 days. Three-month vacations would
be unthinkable for cultures that view rising before dawn every day as key
to success.
KIPP has taken this information seriously, and has developed
a radically different schedule to avoid the summertime slumps. Those
students fortunate enough to be elected to KIPP Academy (through a lottery
system) sign a contract agreeing to the school’s singular, rigorous
schedule: Monday through Friday, students are in class from seven
twenty-five until five; on Saturdays students attend classes from nine to
one; and, perhaps most significantly, students have classes for three weeks
in July from eight to two. That comes out to fifty to sixty percent more
time in classes than normal schools.
Marita is one such student who has agreed to submit to the
rigors of the program. Only twelve years old, KIPP’s schedule and homework
has her up well before the crack of dawn and in bed by eleven or midnight.
KIPP drives a hard bargain, but Marita and many other students like her
have counted the cost, and find KIPP a worthwhile investment, even though
it has meant giving up weekends and evenings with friends and family.
Marita has had to set aside aspects of a cultural legacy that cannot
support or supplement her education. But with students achieving math
scores comparable to New York’s elite prep schools and 80% of KIPP
graduates attending colleges—a proportion unheard of in inner-city public
schools—it is worth it.
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Endnotes
These insights are
just an introduction. If you're ready to dive deeper, pick up a copy of Outliers here. And since we get a commission on
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