Outliers: The Story of Success

The book "Outliers" had a very interesting section about conditioned violence and conflict between a few strange disputing groups. The violence was so intense that death or the potential of death is a small deterring factor. It seems weird these people were not afraid to die. The conflicting groups were oblivious to death. In one case, a boy was shot, near death, and as he approached, his mother; his mother told the boy too stop whining and act more like his brother, who previously died, at the same stop.

Intense and violent conflicts does not recognize legal authority. The groups are engaged in their own private war and play by their own rules. There is an environment of competition between the warring parties and the goal of winning.

In one case, a man appears in court and takes the gavel away from the judge and announces that there will be no court. The judge is forced to leave and returns with armed force.

Cultural pride helps in Escalation of the conflict. The culture of the group is inclined to become hostile over an insult and then escalate the insult into violence, a grass roots form of chivary. At first, causalities are high because the groups lack experience; large numbers of people are networked into the conflict; fighting spans many generations engaging both father and son; group experience takes time to accumulate, but as the groups become smarter and more experienced, the causalities decrease.

At times, the hostilities flare up and the violence leads produces many deaths. At other times the tensions cool down. At other times, the voice of reason is subjugated under the voice of competition and pride.

The conflicting groups are very different from the general body of people. Their behavior fits their belief system and it is inconsistent with general behavior.

The deviation from the general body causes severe skepticism, criticism, and lack of comprehension. The outlier seems special because of his ability and the elements that differentiate him from the group. Specialty includes hard work, opportunity, intelligence, and culture ethnicity. Specialty is not easily accepted by the group. The individuals with specialty do not get general group recognition and prosper quietly.

This is a wonderful book.

I very much like Gladwell's writing style. Whatever he says, I feel like he's being reasonable and thoughtful. He is the opposite of someone like N. N. Taleb, the acerbic author of The Black Swan. Taleb advises humility by being haughty and condescending while Gladwell does so with introspection and humility himself. There is another similarity between these two authors where one did it wrong and the other got it right. Taleb used bizarre fictional scenarios to try to make his points with a flowery "literary" feel. In this book, Gladwell masterfully describes real situations in interesting, yet not overly dramatic ways to do the same. (It's hard to seem overly dramatic when commenting on the actual cockpit recordings of a plane destined to crash.)

This book was a pretty comfortable mix of information and presentation. He used real stories to try and paint a picture that went beyond just the statistical facts. He managed to do this without going into rambling editorials since he did have plenty of fascinating research findings to keep things accurate. At the end he did go into a vague territory that would seem unsubstantiatable by the record available to the public, however, since he was talking about his own family's personal stories, it was quite credible and interesting, and it gave his premise a personal aspect.

The main point of this book is, in my opinion, very important. It's also complicated. The nature of "success" is incredibly oversimplified in our normal existence, but Gladwell shows pretty well how that might be a big mistake. If having a lot of smart talented people doing clever, useful things is good, then surely as a society we'd jump at the chance to double that kind of productivity. I think there is a natural gravitation towards meritocracy, but it is much slower than it needs to be for our introspective species. This book shows why and how we might start to rethink how we plan for success. There is absolutely no moralizing in here, but the thoughtful reader will draw their own conclusions about all kinds of topics. It should put one's successes and failures in context. After reading this I was actually more hopeful that humans can work together to maximize success for us all.

In the never-ending nature vs. nurture debate, Malcolm Gladwell comes down squarely on the side of nurture in "Outliers." That's the fast and dirty gist of the book. Gladwell probably won't convince those on the nature side of the question, and in the popular imagination I doubt this will be the last word by a long shot. Still, he is an elegant, persuasive writer who gives us much to think about.

According to Gladwell, talent and hard work are only part of what makes someone successful. They are important, but circumstances have a lot to due with success as well. He gives examples to back up his claim. In Canada there is an elite Junior Hockey League, out of which many prominent NHL Players have come. In the team, he noticed a disproportionate number born in January. The reason that is that the league determines eligibility by calendar year, so children born on January 1 play in the same league as those born on December 31 in the same year. So adolescents born earlier in the year would be bigger and more mature than their younger counterparts, thereby being identified as better athletes, leading to extra coaching and a better chance of being selected for the elite hockey league. That is an example of cumulative advantage. Another example is with the disparities in education results between lower-class and middle-class children. The tests in early childhood that Gladwell quotes show no significant difference between the two groups at first, but with each year, the lower-class kids fall further behind. The reason is that middle-class parents over the summer constantly expose their children to learning opportunities that simply don't exist in most lower-class homes.

An interesting part of the book for me was his 10,000-hour rule- You can only truly become an expert in something once you've practiced it for 10,000 hours- natural talent makes a difference, but not that much of a difference. Gladwell gives examples from the experiences of the Beatles, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others to demonstrate how, through their unique circumstances and opportunities, they were able to practice their craft for 10,000 hours.

"Outliers" is an excellent book which will hopefully spark a national discussion about success and the factors that create it. And maybe, just maybe, we can talk about how to change circumstances so that more people are successful. Much in his book is no doubt debatable, but it should be debated, and read, and pondered over.

I already was aware that many of the methods by which society selects for "success" are biased towards many under-represented groups. I just didn't realize how many groups were under-represented: culture, language and most surprisingly: birthday.

I appreciated the fact that Gladwell opened the book with a story about Roseto, the small Pennsylvania community of Italian immigrants that lived like Italians. Leading towards abnormally low death rates from "American" health problems. In my own quest for a healthy lifestyle, this story was another level of reinforcement. But did Gladwell completely contradict it by speaking of 24/7/365 work in the book's closing chapters? I was rather aghast at the lifestyle required by children in the KIPP schools, especially after becoming familiar with John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, the fact that the modern education system was built to create a mass of people accustomed to dull repetitive work. However, the point here is that constant schooling is the only way to allow impoverished students to compete with their affluent counterparts.

Frankly, Outliers has led me to summarize that the individual is important to each life's success story but clearly contributes something more like 20% whereas societal context, background, culture, parental influence, etc... results in 80% of our outcomes as "people", and I place people in quotes because I doubt that we truly exist without such context. This may be tough medicine to swallow for a nation like America, devout in its adherence to individualistic ideas like entrepreneur-ship and hard work yielding big results. The philosophies of those around me in a corporate environment often leave little time for relationships and hobbies. The truth is that success is more like a combination of luck and preparation, as demonstrated by the 10,000 hours of practice being the key that set the Beatles and Bill Gates apart when opportunity came knocking. Perhaps the line between genius applied to scientific revelation and isolated anger is all too thin as denoted by Robert Oppenhimer and Chris Langan, respectively. Social background may limit more of our great minds than any other mechanism.

As stated above, most surprising to me was the role that birth date played in professional athlete selection. Seemingly a parody, it is sadly a very real demonstration of how our methods of choosing "winners" from little leagues to SATs lop off a huge chunk of talent from the overall talent pool that we can draw on to solve new approaches to human innovation. A "discrimination" that has played out in my own life, achieving acceptance to Stanford University's Graduate School yet being denied by University of San Diego despite the fact that UCSD admissions didn't review my file, they just saw that I didn't have a 700 quantitative GRE and refused to pursue me any further. I wouldn't want to be part of a school that selected merely on the basis of GRE, if my GRE score led to my denial as part of a holistic view of my record then I would gladly accept that outcome. Doubly so, I don't want to be part of a society that chooses people of status based on such ridiculous criteria, the absurdity of which Gladwell excels in exposing.

One could argue that the evidence of selection bias is too anecdotal but perhaps that is the crux of the entire argument: the stories we tell ourselves about success are outdated and it is time for some new ones. Outliers is a quick read and an important one. I hope that the architects of society at all levels take the opportunity to read or at least skim this volume. Outliers could very quickly and inexpensively bring equality and innovation to new levels of ubiquity.

I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers after viewing him on an interview with Charlie Rose. What I found intriguing was his explanation of why Asians are good at math. Gladwell claims that it is a combination of working hard and how numbers are heard in the Chinese language, which according to Gladwell is more logical. According to him, the work ethic derives from having to cultivate rice, which takes a good deal of labor and SKILL. I thought it was a bit far fetched. I still think so. There can be numerous other cultural explanations other than the one he proposes. China also has an internal control, a northern region that is predominantly wheat growing. He talks about this in a footnote saying that no studies have been done yet. Too bad, because otherwise the arguments are awfully faulty. Then again many of the arguments in the book are.

Success it seems rises from many different conditions (Didn't we already know that?). For Gladwell culture is an important component of determining success at any given field. Opportunity is another component. When opportunity and hard work comingle, then success is a result. Didn't we already know this? Charlie Rose asked him the same thing, and Gladwell said that the reason for his writing the book is that we don't seem to SAY this as a society but instead claim it is all due to hard work alone. I think this is FAIR for Gladwell to say. I think this is the main point of the book. Opportunity is important too.

The book is well written and I think the first half is more interesting than the last half, especially chapters 1-4. It is actually an interesting book if you are going to have kids; you can learn what to do to raise successful kids, like schedule 10,000 hours of practice (of what I don't know; a very few know what they want to do as a child). While Malcolm Gladwell doesn't say it, success seems to be sowed at an early age. You can also amuse yourself by wondering what went wrong if you are not currently successful. Sad to say, it may be too late. Oh well.