The “Rags to Riches” story ark is a compelling one we often romanticize. The thought that we are in control of our own destiny, barring effort and a bit of luck, is an appealing one. However, in his fantastic book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell argues that explaining our heroes’ journeys to success using this framework is too simplistic and can hinder the choices we later make for ourselves:
… in examining the lives of the remarkable among us – the skilled, the talented, and the driven – I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.
To make his case, Gladwell structures his book in two parts: Opportunity and Legacy. This enables and examination of success according to factors an individual personally experiences (opportunities) vs. factors an individual’s ancestors experienced which influence his/her upbringing and culture (Legacy).
Here are the key points from each of these sections:
Part #1 – Opportunity
Point #1 – Opportunities are Distributed by Systems
Opportunities can often arbitrarily distributed within institutions because of systemic rules that affect the distribution – even when this access is said to be merit-based (Matthew Effect). Without investigation, this effect is easy to miss and discount.
Case Study: Hockey, Baseball & Soccer Cut Off Dates
Yearly cut-off dates in sport leagues for young kids advantage the kids born right after those dates as they’ve had more time to develop than kids 6-12 months younger in the same age group. Initially, this is not a large advantage but as these older kids are a bit bigger, faster and dexterous than the others, they get picked for the yearly all-star teams, the development programs which lead to better coaching and more practice time. The initially small advantage of being a bit older gives way to a systematic accumulation of advantage over time. This is particularly prevalent in Canadian hockey because it is hard to practice consistently without being in a formal league with assigned ice time. This produces a dynamic where the roster composition of any elite Canadian hockey team is roughly 40% players born in January-March, 30% born between April-June, 20% between July-September and 10% in the remainder of the year. As you will have guessed, the yearly cut-off date for age groups in Canada is January 1st.
Case Study: School Year Cut Off Dates
Similarly, but to a lesser extent, the same thing happens in schools around the globe. Since there is no distinction made between a 5-year-old born right after the grade cut-off date and one who is nearly 12 months behind in his development, a child can be at a normal stage in their development but be measured against older kids and consequently be afforded less opportunity because of it. This only compounds over time. The difference between hockey and schooling is that a disadvantaged child can have more “practice time” for schooling to make up for lost ground if his parents organize for it.
Interesting Note: Denmark has developed national legislation that prohibits ability grouping until the age of ten to attempt to counter this problem.
Point #2 – Opportunities are Distributed by Timing
Pure talent without practice is a myth. In general, it takes 10,000 hours of meaningful practice in a domain to become an expert (Ericsson Study). However, some are given the opportunity to accumulate these hours much faster than others and this can have a disproportionate effect on their results, especially in brand new fields.
| Case Study | Uncommon Advantage |
| Bill Joy – Co-Founder Sun Microsystems, co-developer of initial version of UNIX | Had access to a time-sharing computer in one of the first universities in the world to have one (early 70s). It was open 24 hours and he was programming 8-10 hours a day |
| Bill Gates – Ex-CEO of Microsoft | High school bought a time-sharing terminal in 1968 (early!) and he fell on several opportunities to code at a young age and school/parents obliged. |
| The Beatles – Arguably the most successful music group of all times | Played Hamburg clubs 270 nights over 1.5 years at 8-10 hours a pop which jump started their careers (practice). |
| The Ultra-Rich Americans of the 1800s | Of the seventy-five richest people in human history (all-time), fourteen are Americans born within 9 years of each other during the American industrialization period (1860s-70s) – They were all among the first people in their fields in the US. |
Point #3 – Opportunities are Generated Due to Context
We cannot attribute success simply to pure intelligence (IQ) as after a certain threshold, higher intelligence levels are no longer correlated with higher levels of “success”. After this threshold, the theory is that Practical intelligence (EQ) and access to opportunity become more important and the opportunity to develop EQ is largely dependent on your upbringing.
Case Study: Chris Langan (IQ of 195) vs. Robert Oppenheimer
- Chris had a poor upbringing; an abusive father & “hands off” mother. He fears authority, is awkward & introverted. When recounting his life, the main tenants are that the cards were stacked against him and he met brick walls that prevented him from achieving his potential.
- On the opposite end of the spectrum, Oppenheimer came from a rich, fostering background and had a similar intelligence level to Chris’. He attended Harvard & Cambridge. He had a bout with depression in school and tried to poison a tutor but nevertheless was able to stay in school by negotiating a simple probation and eventually became Scientific Director for the Manhattan project at age 38.
The big difference between these two is their upbringing. Oppenheimer was raised in a context of “concerted cultivation”. His parents gave him the tools to feel like he had the right to “customize” his life, to navigate while bending the rules and that he was someone of equal importance to others. As for Chris, he was not given the tools to interact with “the system” which cultivated a sense of distance, distrust and constraints which limit his potential regardless of his IQ.
Case Study: The “Termites” Study (Genetic Studies of Geniuses)
- A cohort of high IQ individuals were followed throughout their lifetimes and the distribution of their “success” was similar to that of any other random group of individuals (what a drag for the researcher!).
- Nobel prize winners are smart but are by no means the smartest people on earth when measured on pure intelligence. Context matters.
- The effect of “minority quotas” for university admissions is that, if the admitted meet the threshold of “good enough” from an IQ perspective, they are successful in the same proportion as all other students that graduate the program.
Interesting Note: The “Brick & Blanket Test” (divergence test) is a great way to get a sense for someone’s EQ. It is much more open ended than a traditional IQ test and gives you a window into someone’s psyche. Otherwise, it is very hard to formally measure someone’s EQ.
In chapter 5, Galdwell illustrates the 3 opportunity principles above in a single case study of today’s big wig New York lawyers (Joe Flom and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz). The perfect combo of systems, timing and context gave them great opportunity which they seized to become part of legal folklore.
- System: This set of lawyers are Jewish which was a disadvantage when they entered the job market in New York around 1945-50. No matter how good they were, none of the big “white-shoe” law firms would hire them (antisemitism). This meant they were relegated to small / new practices and the practice of litigation (cases which the big firms refused to take on as it was “below them” – It also represented a very small part of all legal work in the 1950s).
- Timing: These Jewish lawyers in New York were the only ones working on their 10,000 hours in litigation when the 1970s-80s came around and the business context started changing significantly – M&A became ubiquitous and the size of deals exploded. The lawyers best positioned to take advantage of these trends were this group of Jewish lawyers. Also, since they were born in a demographic trough right after world war I, they had easier access to all the best schools and there was less overall competition in their age group.
- Context: Certainly, there were other non-Jewish lawyers practicing litigation in New York – Why did the Jewish ones do so much better than the others? Well, their upbringing was very conducive to taking advantage of the opportunity. They mostly grew up in households where their parents worked in the New York garment trade which gave them front row seats to business skills and negotiation (vs other trades where this wasn’t the case for children). Their parents had come over from Europe with these skills and the industry was booming in New York when they arrived.
Part #2 – Legacy
In the second part of the book, Gladwell digs deeper on the context part of the equation by examining cultural legacies and their influence on individual success with several additional case studies. The main takeaway is that the context your ancestors grew up and lived in is as if not more important than the context in the span of a single generation.
Case Study #1 – Harlan, Kentucky
- Family feuds and a “culture of honor” were prevalent along the US Appalachian mountain chain in the 1800s.
- Families moved from the lowlands of Scotland, northern counties of England and Ulster in Northern Ireland to this desolate and isolated region because you couldn’t really farm, meaning you needed to be a herdsman to survive and that’s what these families did back home.
- As these areas were all newly settled and relatively “up for grabs”, a “culture of honor” prevailed as the law of the land and escalated to mob style killings in quite a few counties over the century.
- Today, as the population has grown and honor is less critical to survival, this is no longer the dynamic along the Appalachian range and has not been for many generations. However, people from that area still demonstrate many culture of honor traits today when compared to the rest of the US.
Case Study #2 – Culture and Plane Crashes
- In the 1980s-90s, Korea Air had the worst “loss rate” (accidents) of any airline worldwide. They had the same equipment, training, conditions as other companies but somehow were involved in more accidents.
- A study revealed that the main issue for Korean Air was a cultural one. Because of the deep respect around hierarchy and language patterns that put the brunt of understanding on the listener instead of the speaker (vs. western speech), there was often fatal communication breakdown between the pilot and co-pilots. Once this cultural aspect was addressed in training, Korea Air numbers came back up to the industry norm.
- All countries can be placed on the Uncertainty Avoidance Index and the Power Distance Index. Both these factors are cultural context indicators that should be taken into consideration when trying to achieve something in a particular country.
Case Study #3 – Asian Math Dominance
Data supports the fact that Asian countries do much better at math than non-Asian countries. Why is that?
- It turns out that success in math is directly correlated with the amount of time and serious effort dedicated to working on your understanding of a problem. So, in short, there is a direct correlation between effort and success in math.
- This is also true in ancient Asian agriculture of rice where all the inputs are controlled directly, and more time spent perfecting a tiny rice paddy is directly correlated with a higher yield.
- This wasn’t the case in most other prevalent types of agriculture such as wheat where the weather, the fields’ mineral contents, and general crop requirements greatly influence the size of a harvest and makes it feel a bit like a lottery.
Galdwell posits that this cultural legacy of differences in agriculture is one of the main reasons for the cultural difference around work (and success in math!) between Asian and non-Asian cultures today.
The great part is that once we understand these principles and their origin, there is nothing stopping us from changing our cultural legacy to adopt new behaviors and give us the best chance to achieve our goals. Gladwell illustrates this in the last case study of the book with Kipp High Schools.
Case Study #4 – Kipp Schools
Kids who have been raised in challenging situations and look to be heading down paths determined by their cultural and parental legacy can choose to go to the Kipp schools to seek a change. Kipp schools are very different from traditional US schools (much longer days, strict rules, very little summer vacation, etc.) which gives the kids a chance to change course which is much harder in the traditional system.
Conclusion
My key takeaway from this book is that although hard work and grit are a requirement for success, systems, timing and context (cultural and generational) plays a massive role on our ability to reach our goals. By being conscious of this fact, we can better play the hand we are dealt to heighten our chances of success in our endeavors. If I was to summarize the book in one equation, it would be:
Success = Effort ^ (System + Timing + Context)
What I liked.
- I believe Malcom Gladwell has the mind (and haircut) of a mad scientist – his interests and the examples used to underscore his points are so varied that you wonder how the heck he went about putting it all together. He is one of the greats in creative non-fiction and this book clearly shows that.
- Great structure to the book – table of contents, index, notes, references. If you follow me at all, you know I am a stickler for this because I will often remember a tidbit of a story after having read the book and will want to be able to quickly find it again later. Also, if the author has piqued my curiosity of a particular topic but doesn’t go deep enough for my liking, there’s a whole new reading list ready in the references if done correctly.
- It made me challenge my naivete on icons in any field and I now want to “pull the curtain back on the Wizard of Oz” for all of them.
What Could Have Been Better.
- Although there is a coherent narrative throughout the book (as illustrated above), we sometimes get lost in the details of the case studies and Galdwell doesn’t always do a great job of coming back to the point he is trying to make in that section of the book at the end of it. We have always learned something very interesting but are left wondering how it relates to the overall message. As Galdwell doesn’t always spell it out, we need to review the chapter to make sense of it. However, Galdwell usually does summarize his key points in bookend chapters, I just wish he did it more to keep stringing us along.
Rating: 5/5
Personal Library Worthy? Yes. Outliers will have you questioning some of the fundamental principles you have taken from granted forever and shift your perspective on how to go about reaching your goals. You’ll also want to come back to it for the fascinating stories documented in the case studies for use in your own work.
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Did you enjoy Outliers? How did you think it compared to Malcolm Gladwell’s other books? What was your key takeaway? Let me know in the comments.
Last Updated on December 22, 2020 by Joël Collin-Demers