Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, is one of his most popular pieces. He kicks off the first chapter titled "The Matthew Effect" with an incredible discovery by Roger Barnsley, a Canadian Psychologist, who stumbled upon a pattern in young Canadian hockey players that revealed that an overwhelming number of these hockey players were born in the first quarter of the year (January, February, and March), while very few were born in the last quarter of the year (October, November, and December). How is it possible! Is it luck or a result of their horoscope? Let's understand their story of success.
Discovery Shoppe Book Club comes up with two thought-provoking book reviews per month. These reviews give a good summary of our current read and also serve as a guide to potential readers. Read through for the second half of Outliers.
Outliers: Chapters 1-5
This discovery is the beginning of what Gladwell calls “accumulative advantage”. He explains this strange phenomenon with the Canadian hockey teams, whose eligibility cut-off for age-class hockey is January 1st. Thus, “a child who turns 10 on January 2nd could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year (Dec 31st) - and at that age of preadolescence, a 12-month age gap represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.” The difference between a child who is 9 years 1 day on January 1st and a child who has been 9 years for the past 11 months induces a huge unfair advantage. This is because when coaches start to select players for the all-star teams of ages 9 or 10, they are more likely to view the bigger and more coordinated players as more talented due to their benefit of critical extra months of maturity. This explains why the majority of young Canadian hockey players are born in the first quarter of the year, while those born in the latter quarters are disadvantaged.
Gladwell opines that there is something "profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success". Success is not based on just individual talent, but often those who are successful are “the beneficiaries of hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies” which pile up to become an “accumulative advantage”.
He buttresses his point by stating that “innate talent” — the aptitude, intelligence, and capability we are essentially born with — can only become expertise with lots of practice. The exact amount? Somewhere around 10,000 hours. This number of hours was illustrated with the lives of Bill Joy, The Beatles, and Bill Gates.
Apart from the long hours of practice needed for success, Gladwell argues that where and when you are born plays a huge role in whether or not you become successful. He explains the importance of timing by highlighting that 14 of the 75 richest people in recorded history were born within 9 years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Those 14 people were neither too young nor too old to take advantage of the opportunities that came with the United States' industrial boom - when the railroad industry and the Wall Street financial firms were being built. He argues that it matters how old you were when the transformation happened. Likewise, if Bill Gates had been born even just five years later or earlier, he may not have been as successful as he is today.
Furthermore, Gladwell argues that success is not necessarily a factor of how brilliant you are. Studies show that the relationship between intelligence and success becomes wavy above IQ levels of 120. Hence to be successful, one needs to also have what he calls “practical intelligence”. This is the ability to be creative with knowledge, to negotiate, to have charisma, and to not be intimidated, all of which is usually taught to kids of wealthier families and not so much to kids of lower-class families - meaning that parenting style also influences success.
Finally, if we were to make a checklist for the road to success according to Gladwell’s first five chapters of Outliers, we’d say that a person needs a combination of innate talent, 10,000 hours of practice, accumulative advantages, and of course the right timing. Overall, we rate Outliers 8/10!
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Discovery Shoppe Book Club
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