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Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

by Andrew Collins on November 28, 2010

in Book Reviews

Editor’s Note: In more than two decades of journalism, at The Washington Post and then The New Yorker magazine, Malcolm Gladwell has fed his curiosity with innumerable questions and swept his audience along on countless journeys of discovery. When the ideas just got too big for articles, he started writing books – three in the last nine years. The latest of his book-length works, Outliers, caught the attention of RedFence, and we decided to take a look back at all three of his books. RF newcomer Andrew Collins began, in February, with The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000). Then he explored Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005). And, now, Outliers: The Story of Success (2008). A collection of Gladwell’s work at The New Yorker can be found in his latest book, What the Dog Saw. — TG

Bootstrap Billionaires?
by Andrew Collins

Little Billy Gates had a big dream, a snootful of talent, and the aw-shucks gumption to build his ideas into an empire. Up by his own bootstraps. It’s the American dream. Right?

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, the answer should be, “Kind of.”

As the title suggests, Gladwell’s third consecutive New York Times Best Seller investigates human “outliers,” challenging the reader’s notion of success and the “self-made man” who allegedly rises to the top without help from anyone or anything. The writer’s agenda is simple: “I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work . . . It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

The book opens with a case study of Roseto, a small Pennsylvania town established by Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Nearby towns were full of immigrants from other nations, but Rosetans kept to themselves, creating their own little isolated community. Then a physician named Stewart Wolf noticed that Roseto’s people suffered little from common health issues like heart attacks and ulcers. Wolf teamed up with sociologist John Bruhn to investigate this outlying trend of good health.

At first they could find nothing peculiar about Roseto. The trends of Rosetans’ diet, exercise, genes, and location hardly differed at all from those of neighboring populations. Eventually, Wolf and Bruhn concluded that it was the close-knit social community and strong family ties that kept Rosetans healthy. The three-generation families and civic groups that characterized life in Roseto somehow made people healthier. Roseto’s cultural legacy made it an outlier.

Gladwell proceeds to draw many more examples from a wonderful variety of sources. He delves into, among other things, the stories of successful Jewish lawyers in New York City, mathematically inclined Chinese farmers, and the causes — and solution — behind the high crash rate of Korean airline pilots. He argues that it takes both thousands of hours of hard work and remarkable good fortune to become an outlier. There is no such thing, Gladwell writes, as a person who rises to the top through sheer personal effort and ability.

Even Bill Gates, one of the most economically successful men ever, has the honesty to admit that he was very lucky to have had the opportunities that made him into a software billionaire. After all, not every teenager back in the ‘60s had 24/7 access to an ASR33 Teletype time-sharing terminal, nor did most people live within walking distance of Washington University, which had free computer time every day. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time,” Gates says, and Gladwell puts the pieces together from there, writing that “Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and athletes, they seem like the rule.”

That said, Gladwell does not speak of a fatalistic view of reality where successful people are merely the product of cultures and circumstances outside of their control. You don’t even have a chance at big time success, Gladwell says, until you put in the time — thousands of long, brutal hours. The Beatles performed more than one thousand times before their first big-time success in 1964. Bill Gates had some rare opportunities with early computers, but they would have done nothing for him had he not spent most of his childhood sitting in front of them.

Structurally, Outliers is unique among Gladwell’s offerings. Unlike The Tipping Point and Blink, this book he divides into two distinct parts. The first half focuses on “Opportunity,” the small but important keys that chance — fate, providence, or whatever you want to call it — gives to those who have achieved remarkable success. The second part deals with “Legacy,” the impact that cultural heritage has on one’s ability to succeed — or tendency to fail. Gladwell eventually distills this to a thesis where success is predicated on two basic things: one’s unique chances in life and cultural background. And of course, spending a minimum of 10,000 hours practicing an art or discipline.

Like Gladwell’s previous books, Outliers is a pleasure to read — simple and clear, yet intelligent, engaging, and even artistic at times. He occasionally treats readers to rich descriptions like: “His sentences came marching out, one after another, polished and crisp, like soldiers on a parade ground.” But best of all, the book is downright fun in some parts. In his discussion of genius Chris Langan, Gladwell includes a footnote with a question from a super IQ test, but admits, “if you want to know the answer, I’m afraid I have no idea.”

Outliers also comes chock-full of potential taglines ranging from the profound to the wry. One section, for instance, ends with this summary: “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from — and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.”

No glaring flaws stand out in Outliers (in fact, Gladwell takes great care in stepping around the dangerous ground of cultural pros and cons that form the basis for part two), but there are a few times when the writer assaults readers with so many different names in a single chapter that it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. Good luck breezing through his discussion of Jewish lawyers in New York City, or the feuding families of the Appalachian Mountains. Don’t expect a particularly light read, because Outliers will make you focus and think. Even though it never becomes so complex that it begins to lose quality, the more tedious parts of the book do slow down the pace.

In the end, Gladwell brings a call to both optimism and humility. He invites those who have already climbed the ladder of success to look back at all the rungs of cultural heritage and unique opportunities that allowed them to get there. “It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter, to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, ‘I did all this by myself.’” To those just beginning to step out into life and make something of themselves, he obviously recommends hard work, but work tempered with an eye for opportunities.

And it’s not as if opportunities don’t come by or can’t be created. There’s a lot of potential for greatness out there, Gladwell says. When we realize that the only thing keeping someone from crashing a plane or becoming the next hockey star is a birthday or a cultural legacy, perhaps we can make a few more additions to “the story of success.

OutliersOutliers
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date: June 7, 2011
Available at: All major booksellers
Price: $19.00 (hardback), $10.00 (paperback)

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