Book Review: Outliers

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Outliers is very much in the same vein or at least style as Malcom Gladwell's preceeding titles. Quirky bits of information that when rallied around the same arguement come up with something interesting. I feel that with this book Gladwell actually takes on a larger arguement than his other books, its ultimately the Nature vs Nurture arguement but using extremely successful people as the case studies. Gladwell argues for nurture being the largest component of success and uses everything from the Canadian Hockey Team to Bill Gates to why Asian kids are good at math to form his arguement.



Some nick-nack info highlights



Canadian Hockey Team - Most players are born in January, February and March. Their birth month line them up to be the biggest kids in their early teams. 10-12 month differences when you are 5 and 6 can mean you are dramatically bigger. The bigger and better players get special attention, more training, and ultimately more hours of practice, so by the time they are in their late teens they are significantly better.



10,000 hour rule - People with 10,000 hours of practice at one thing tend to be experts and if you get this 10,000 hours in before say the age of 20, you have a much greater chance to go really far.



Bill Gates - had access to one of the first computers at a super young age and would spend hours upon hours on it, so by the time everyone else is starting to hear about personal computers, Gates has already logged in 10,000+ hours of programming time. Similar stories for Bill Joy and Steve Jobs.



Math - kids that can focus do good in math. Your ability to focus on one subject for a period of time has a direct correlation to your math abilities. Asian kids do better in math because they come from a culture of extreme focus that grew out of needing to tend to rice paddies. Western societies grew wheat and other less intensively cultivated crops, so their focus ability is culturaly less. This part of the book gets a bit dodgy, but the chinese proverbs vs western proverbs are good:



"If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy" - Chinese



"If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it" - Russian



You can change your nurture -

1) as seen by Korea Airlines turning its horrible air record around, by changing the nurture/culture of its pilots and co-pilots to be not Korean.

2) As seen in the KIPP school in the Bronx, where kids are sort of reconditioned to be in a different culture than that which is around them and the students do amazingly well.



The basic underlying statement is that nurture plays a huge role in success. You have to be in the right environment at the right time to be wildly successful, but you can choose to change your environment and to some degree your nurture. I think the real question that is dodged all the way through is what is success?



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