Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell

What accounts for stupendous success in life? Is it talent or luck or hard work? It’s probably a combination of all three, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 bestseller, “Outliers: The Story of Success.”

Gladwell lumps the reasons for success into three broad buckets. First is “luck” or perhaps what we today might call “privilege.” Consider the case of elite Canadian hockey players. Gladwell shows that over 40% of the players in the most competitive junior (16-year-olds) hockey league in Canada were born between January and March. Less than 10% were born October through December. How can this be explained? Simple, Gladwell writes. The competitive selection process begins at age eight. Coaches are asked to identify the best players on their teams, which are then put in a special, advanced league. These select teams have better coaches, play twice as many games, and practice three times as much as the regular league, all against superior players. If the players were only a bit better than the rest of their peers at the start of the season, by the end they are significantly better. A player born on January 3rd is essentially a full year older than a player born on November 30th. That player is likely bigger, faster, stronger, and thus has a much better chance at getting picked for the advanced league. Gladwell notes that the entire process is, in theory, meritocratic, but in practice, incredibly unfair. The Canadian national hockey team is the best in the world – and it could be even better if its junior hockey selection process was more equitable.

Gladwell makes a similar claim with birth years. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy, and Eric Schmidt are all titans of the computer industry. And they were all born in or around 1955. If they had been born a bit earlier or a bit later we likely would have never heard their names, he says. The same is true for the robber barons of the late nineteenth century. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and George Pullman were all born in the 1830s. Yes, talent is important, he argues, but you’ll likely only achieve dramatic success if you’re born at exactly the right time and in the right place. “Successful people don’t do it alone,” Gladwell says. “Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.”

Gladwell’s second key to success is perhaps the most obvious: hard work. He shows that you really can’t divorce exceptional success for exceptional hard work. In one of my favorite examples in the whole book, the Berlin Academy of Music divided the school’s violinists into three groups – average, good, and outstanding. They then explored how much practice time each violinist had reported committing over the course of their career. They found that the violinists in the outstanding group, those with the potential to become world-class soloists, all reported in excess of 10,000 hours of practice time. There were no examples of “gifted” violinists whose exceptional natural talent had carried them into the top group. Likewise, there were no violinists in the average group who reported over 10,000 hours.

Gladwell shows that exceptional intelligence by itself doesn’t count for much. He highlights the character of Christopher Langan, an American man with a reported IQ of 200, some 50 points higher than Albert Einstein. Despite being born in the Land of Opportunity and armed with a genius IQ, Langan spent most of his adult life working as a bouncer at a bar on Long Island. Why? Because, Gladwell argues, he lacked the middle class culture and necessary support infrastructure to make more of his life. Brains alone isn’t going to cut it. He makes the same point with a group of California schoolchildren identified as exceptionally intelligent in the early twentieth century just as the IQ test was being developed. Researchers followed their educational and career development closely for decades certain that they would soon blossom into Nobel Laureates and titans of industry. For the most part, that never happened. The researchers were stunned (and disappointed). If there is a key ingredient to remarkable success, exceptional intelligence evidently isn’t it.

Third, and likely most controversially, is culture. Gladwell wants to know why it is that Asians appear to be so good at math. His unorthodox explanation is rice paddies. The cultivation of rice paddies is an intricate and time consuming process, far more complicated and labor intensive than the cultivation of grains, which is the foundation of western diets. Moreover, rice can be harvested three times a year and the paddy never needs to lie fallow. The upshot is that the average Asian rice farmer works much longer than his western counterpart. Asian culture is thus much more work-focused as captured in this classic Chinese saying, “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.” Gladwell says that it is this dogged commitment to hard work that explains Asian success in math, not any genetic predisposition to numbers. Gladwell cites an interesting finding from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) that tests math skills across countries. In addition to the math test, the study also asks participants to answer 120 demographic questions. Researchers found that you can accurately predict how well a student will do on the math portion of the test by looking at how many demographic questions they answered. In short, Asian students are going to follow instructions and answer all the questions. It’s the same attention to detail and commitment to completing work that in turn makes them “good at math.” Or as Gladwell writes, “Our ability to succeed at what we do it powerfully bound up with where we’re from…”

Gladwell also demonstrates how culture can have unanticipated bad outcomes. He uses the examples of several recent commercial aircraft disasters that were entirely preventable. He argues that aircrews that came from countries with a high score on the “Power Distance Index” (i.e. attitudes toward hierarchy and how a culture values and respects authority) were more likely to defer to the captain in dangerous situations, even when that deference led clearly and directly to catastrophe.

In closing, I loved this book, but I love all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books. He picks such interesting topics and finds such compelling case studies. His overall conclusion – “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them” – is obvious and unobjectionable enough. There’s an old saying, “hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.” It seems to me that this is what Gladwell is arguing, but with the added caveat that hard work alone isn’t always enough.