Outliers

“The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” 

At the heart of success is hard work. The research presented in this quotation belies our romantic notion of people born with genius; instead, there’s a straight line from hard work to success. The amount of practice to reach the elite level in any field, Ericsson found, was about 10,000 hours.

“The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program—like a hockey all-star squad—or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.” 

A person must have enough free time to put in the hard work noted in Ericsson’s study. Coming from a well-off family often means one has ample free time as a young person to hone a skill, as one can avoid distractions like having to work. Another path is to be selected by a program that provides intense training and practice. Individual hard work sounds like the common notion of success, but what allows the hard work to take place is what Gladwell’s concept of success entails.

“I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren’t, just as not every business titan in the United States was born in the mid-1830s. But there are very clearly patterns here, and what’s striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” 

This quotation refers to Gladwell’s assertion that success is often a factor of being in the right place at the right time. Such factors are out of our control and come along as lucky breaks. Here he notes the optimal birth date for taking advantage of the computer revolution that swept the United States starting in the 1970s. Simply put, if Bill Gates was born a little earlier or a little later, we might not know his name today.

“So far in Outliers, we’ve seen that extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity. In this chapter, I want to try to dig deeper into why that’s the case by looking at the outlier in its purest and most distilled form—the genius. For years, we’ve taken our cues from people like Terman when it comes to understanding the significance of high intelligence. But, as we shall see, Terman made an error. He was wrong about his Termites, and had he happened on the young Chris Langan working his way through Principia Mathematica at the age of sixteen, he would have been wrong about him for the same reason. Terman didn’t understand what a real outlier was, and that’s a mistake we continue to make to this day.” 

Gladwell takes on the idea of genius that is so strong in our concept of success. The quotation refers to Chris Langan, who has perhaps the highest IQ of anyone alive today, and Lewis Terman, head of the most in-depth study of intelligence (his subjects were nicknamed “Termites”). If genius controls success, it makes sense that the more intelligent one is, the greater success he or she will attain. In Chapters 3 and 4, Gladwell shows why this is wrong because it does not factor in one’s background.

“Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.” 

These words come from psychologist Barry Schwartz, and Gladwell uses them to make a point about IQ levels. Intelligence is important to success but is not the sole factor in attaining it. He argues that being “smart enough” is key, but other factors take over. Chris Langan is the perfect example of this, unable to find great success despite his unmatched IQ level. He never mastered “practical intelligence,” or the ability to navigate through life and get others to do what you want.

“By the time the Termites reached adulthood, Terman’s error was plain to see. Some of his child geniuses had grown up to publish books and scholarly articles and thrive in business. Several ran for public office, and there were two superior court justices, one municipal court judge, two members of the California state legislature, and one prominent state official. But few of his geniuses were nationally known figures. They tended to earn good incomes—but not that good. The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a surprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures. Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses. His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be Nobel laureates—William Shockley and Luis Alvarez—and rejected them both. Their IQs weren’t high enough.” 

This is more proof that IQ alone is not a sure recipe for success. Terman’s famous study identified children of high intelligence as measured by IQ tests and followed them throughout their lives. Based on IQ alone, the subjects of the study should have been much more successful than they were. This evidence from rigorous research proves the point in the previous quotation, supporting the anecdotal evidence of Chris Langan’s story.

“Oppenheimer, by rights, was a long shot. He was just thirty-eight, and junior to many of the people whom he would have to manage. He was a theorist, and this was a job that called for experimenters and engineers. His political affiliations were dodgy: he had all kinds of friends who were Communists. Perhaps more striking, he had never had any administrative experience. ‘He was a very impractical fellow,’ one of Oppenheimer’s friends later said. ‘He walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat, and, more important, he didn’t know anything about equipment.’ As one Berkeley scientist put it, more succinctly: ‘He couldn’t run a hamburger stand.’

“Oh, and by the way, in graduate school he tried to kill his tutor. This was the résumé of the man who was trying out for what might be said to be—without exaggeration—one of the most important jobs of the twentieth century. And what happened? The same thing that happened twenty years earlier at Cambridge: he got the rest of the world to see things his way.” 

Gladwell uses the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called “father of the atomic bomb,” to contrast with that of Chris Langan. The quotation begins by referring to his being named to lead the Manhattan Project to develop the bomb during World War II. Oppenheimer and Langan were both highly intelligent—considered geniuses—but Oppenheimer had great practical intelligence as well, which enabled him to talk himself out of a jam and into unlikely positions of leadership.

“It is important to understand where the particular mastery of that moment comes from. It’s not genetic. Alex Williams didn’t inherit the skills to interact with authority figures from his parents and grandparents the way he inherited the color of his eyes. Nor is it racial: it’s not a practice specific to either black or white people. As it turns out, Alex Williams is black and Katie Brindle is white. It’s a cultural advantage. Alex has those skills because over the course of his young life, his mother and father—in the manner of educated families—have painstakingly taught them to him, nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game, right down to that little rehearsal in the car on the way to the doctor’s office.” 

This refers to a study of what one sociologist calls “concerted cultivation.” Gladwell highlights the role of family background in success, and this is part of it. Families who are wealthier and better educated have a cultural advantage because they teach their children how to act in different situations and advocate for themselves. This allows the children to navigate the world better as they grow older, leading to practical intelligence.

“We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds. But the true story of Joe Flom’s life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version because all the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantages—that he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depression—turn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages. Joe Flom is an outlier. But he’s not an outlier for the reasons you might think, and the story of his rise provides a blueprint for understanding success in his profession.” 

Gladwell states that it is wrong to believe that geniuses automatically gain success, and it is also wrong to interpret underdog stories as the result of dogged hard work by an individual. There is always a backstory that involves factors from one’s background or culture that pay dividends. There are also the unexpected, intangible factors—for example, turning disadvantages into advantages.

“Think of how similar this is to the stories of Bill Joy and Bill Gates. Both of them toiled away in a relatively obscure field without any great hopes for worldly success. But then—boom!—the personal computer revolution happened, and they had their ten thousand hours in. They were ready. Flom had the same experience. For twenty years he perfected his craft at Skadden, Arps. Then the world changed and he was ready. He didn’t triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.” 

Gladwell returns to the 10,000-hour rule with the story of Joe Flom. The reality of supposed “overnight success” involves a great deal of hidden work. Flom worked hard for two decades before becoming successful when corporate takeovers became popular in the 1970s. Gladwell notes that opportunities often come out of nowhere, presenting themselves by chance or in a fortunate historical moment. 

“The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.” 

This extends the idea found in the previous two quotations. Hard work is important for success, as is family background and often culture. However, a key factor in many success stories is something we have no control over: being in the right place at the right time. Despite a fondness for stories of pluck and overcoming odds by oneself, success often comes down to an accident of history.

“Jewish immigrants like the Floms and the Borgenichts and the Janklows were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Irish and the Italians were peasants, tenant farmers from the impoverished countryside of Europe. Not so the Jews. For centuries in Europe, they had been forbidden to own land, so they had clustered in cities and towns, taking up urban trades and professions. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the thirty years or so before the First World War had some kind of occupational skill. They had owned small groceries or jewelry stores. They had been bookbinders or watchmakers. Overwhelmingly, though, their experience lay in the clothing trade. They were tailors and dressmakers, hat and cap makers, and furriers and tanners.”

This is an example of one such accident of history. Gladwell’s story in Chapter 5 is dependent on time and place. An entire generation of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived in New York around the turn of the 20th century with skills that happened to be in high demand as the garment industry in the US took off. Thus, they did well for themselves and their families, putting their children through college, while many immigrants from other areas of the world had to make do as laborers.

“The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds, that he is not weak. He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation—and that’s what a ‘culture of honor’ means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth.”

In Chapter 6, Gladwell explains that Harlan, Kentucky’s strong “culture of honor” came from the British settlers to the area. The quotation is an example of how Gladwell uses research about culture in the second half of the book. Here and in Chapter 8, he examines cultural aspects that go back centuries and applies them to the present day to illustrate their staying power. 

“That study is strange, isn’t it? It’s one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors’ act a lot like their ancestors. But those southerners in the hallway study weren’t living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors. They didn’t even necessarily have British ancestors. They just happened to have grown up in the South. None of them were herdsmen. Nor were their parents herdsmen. They were living in the late twentieth century, not the late nineteenth century. They were students at the University of Michigan, in one of the northernmost states in America, which meant they were sufficiently cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles from the south to go to college. And none of that mattered. They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky.” 

This refers to the study at the University of Michigan regarding the culture of honor. It illustrates the strong hold of culture in our lives. Gladwell enumerates all the original conditions that led to a culture of honor in the South; despite their absence generations later, this aspect of culture was as strong as ever. 

“Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes. In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split the flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the ‘flying seat.’ At first that seems to make no sense, since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience. But think about the Air Florida crash. If the first officer had been the captain, would he have hinted three times? No, he would have commanded—and the plane wouldn’t have crashed. Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up.” 

The hierarchy in a flight crew can often interfere with clear, direct communication, as the above quotation shows. Mitigated speech can be a way of being polite or deferring to authority, but it can be deadly in the cockpit. The Power Distance Index formulated by researcher Geert Hofstede shows that cultures vary in how much they defer to authority, indicating that where a flight crew is from can indeed have an impact on the safety of the flight. 

“To Western ears, it seems strange that the flight engineer would bring up this subject just once. Western communication has what linguists call a ‘transmitter orientation’—that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. Even in the tragic case of the Air Florida crash, where the first officer never does more than hint about the danger posed by the ice, he still hints four times, phrasing his comments four different ways, in an attempt to make his meaning clear. He may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain, but he was still operating within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.

“But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. In the engineer’s mind, he has said a lot.” 

This quotation is located in the section on cultural legacy, where the author argues that the culture of South Korea played a role in the high incidence of plane crashes in that country’s main airline. Gladwell analyzes speech patterns of flight crews from various countries to show that they are often a factor in accidents. The way the crew speaks among themselves or interacts with air traffic controllers from a different culture causes miscommunication at a crucial moment. This supports Gladwell’s theme of culture influencing behavior. 

“But first we have to be frank about a subject that we would all too often rather ignore. In 1994, when Boeing first published safety data showing a clear correlation between a country’s plane crashes and its score on Hofstede’s Dimensions, the company’s researchers practically tied themselves in knots trying not to cause offense. ‘We’re not saying there’s anything here, but we think there’s something there’ is how Boeing’s chief engineer for airplane safety put it. Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.” 

Gladwell notes the importance of culture on behavior while also addressing stereotypes. Stereotypes receive much of the attention in terms of cultural influence, lending the latter a negative connotation. Gladwell, however, wants to take back the idea (if not the word itself, which he does not use in his theory), by simply maintaining that culture does have an influence on people. It can be positive or negative, but we should acknowledge it and use it to our benefit.

“The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens-nine.

“‘The Asian system is transparent,’ says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist who has closely studied Asian-Western differences. ‘I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there’s a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it’s sensible. For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally “out of five parts, take three.” That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.’”

Gladwell posits that the logical nature of many Asian languages allows children who speak them to learn math more easily and thus more quickly. They don’t have to spend time learning vocabulary by rote to learn math; the vocabulary in a sense teaches math as the children learn it. As a result, researchers estimate that Asian children are a whole year ahead of English-speaking children in math by age five. Considering the previous quotation, this illustrates Gladwell’s claim that we cannot deny the influence of culture.

“Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn’t even have to give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work.”

This quotation illustrates the importance of both hard work and culture. It supports Gladwell’s thesis that (a) working hard at math equals succeeding at math and (b) Asian cultures, because of the legacy of rice farming, teach their children to work hard. It refers to the TIMSS test in math, which is accompanied by a long survey. Students taking the test also take the survey, but some don’t complete it. A researcher named Boe noticed a direct correlation to how much of the survey was filled out (indicating the level of effort) and the results of the math test itself. Asian students topped both categories.

“This idea—that effort must be balanced by rest—could not be more different from Asian notions about study and work, of course. But then again, the Asian worldview was shaped by the rice paddy. In the Pearl River Delta, the rice farmer planted two and sometimes three crops a year. The land was fallow only briefly. In fact, one of the singular features of rice cultivation is that because of the nutrients carried by the water used in irrigation, the more a plot of land is cultivated, the more fertile it gets.

“But in Western agriculture, the opposite is true. Unless a wheat- or cornfield is left fallow every few years, the soil becomes exhausted. Every winter, fields are empty. The hard labor of spring planting and fall harvesting is followed, like clockwork, by the slower pace of summer and winter. This is the logic the reformers applied to the cultivation of young minds. We formulate new ideas by analogy, working from what we know toward what we don’t know, and what the reformers knew were the rhythms of the agricultural seasons. A mind must be cultivated. But not too much, lest it be exhausted. And what was the remedy for the dangers of exhaustion? The long summer vacation—a peculiar and distinctive American legacy that has had profound consequences for the learning patterns of the students of the present day.”

Gladwell explains the differences in the approach to education between Western and Asian cultures. His idea is that growing rice compared to other crops required more work and less down time. This in turn was applied to theories of learning, so the Asian approach to studying is working as hard as possible. Conversely, in Western cultures, the idea took hold that the mind needed to rest, just as fields lie fallow between harvests. This resulted in a much longer summer vacation period in the West, which Gladwell argues is bad for students. 

“What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding—all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at the second table, which shows what happens between September and June. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.”

Karl Alexander led a study that showed test scores for lower socioeconomic students declined most over the summer; during the school year, they were on par with other students. Students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds had access to tutoring and enrichment programs over the summer, which is why their test scores remained higher. This is proof, according to Gladwell, that the Asian model of a short summer vacation leads to more learning.

“Marita’s life is not the life of a typical twelve-year-old. Nor is it what we would necessarily wish for a twelve-year-old. Children, we like to believe, should have time to play and dream and sleep. Marita has responsibilities. What is being asked of her is the same thing that was asked of the Korean pilots. To become a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit. Marita has had to do the same because the cultural legacy she had been given does not match her circumstances either—not when middle- and upper-middle-class families are using weekends and summer vacation to push their children ahead. Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekends and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” 

This quotation provides an illustration for Gladwell’s theme of the role culture plays in success. Marita is a student at the charter school called KIPP Academy, which is described in detail in Chapter 9. After explaining in the previous chapter the strength of Asian cultures in the teaching of math, he describes how KIPP Academy has adopted that culture (hard work, longer school days, and shorter summer vacations) to improve test scores among underprivileged students in the Bronx. 

“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.” 

This quote emphasizes Gladwell’s points about background and accumulative advantage trumping individual merit. He concludes that, ironically, people we think of as outliers are not exceptional in themselves; they are part of the typical course of events and produced by a system that can be altered by society.