“It is not the brightest who succeed nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” Even if some conclusions in this book might sound laughable to you, this may leave you scratching your head. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. Contrarily Gladwell states that the year as well as the month we are born makes a huge difference in our lives. In order to prove his statements, he talks about Canadian hockey that runs on a merit system. Gladwell notes how a staggering proportion of professional hockey players are born between January and March. The reason? In school the cutoff for team selection is January 1st, meaning that the kids who are born early in the year can be up to a year older than those born later in the year. When you are very young, that kind of difference is huge in terms of physical maturity. The effect, however, is cumulative. Since such kids do well early, they are put in “A” teams from the beginning and given more training and more hours of practice. Once again looking at birthdates of highly successful tech entrepreneurs, Gladwell notes a pattern. This time, it becomes apparent that these guys were born at just the right time to take advantage of the personal computing revolution. This success, to a huge degree, came from being born at a time when a new technology was emerging. “their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.” Which leads to the next key point. This is probably the premise that Gladwell is most well-known for , the idea that pretty much everyone who is really good at something has practiced that something for about 10,000 hours. This shows why Bill Gates and The Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stretches in Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. What is less known about bill gates is he attended the only middle school in the united states with a computer terminal which allowed him as an eighth grader to rack up the kind of hours of programming practice which, in 1968, was usually found in PhD students. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison’s famous saying about 98% perspiration and Feynman’s claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. The relationship between success and IQ works only to a point. Once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real world advantage. Intelligence, personality and ambition are not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a culture in which hard work and ingenuity are encouraged.

The second component of success, once you are over the IQ threshold, is what Gladwell refers to as “practical intelligence”. Gladwell cites a study analyzing the parental approaches of low income vs high income class families and asserts that practical intelligence is, the product of middle class style of nurturing which gives children more of a sense of entitlement. This is not entitlement in the negative sense of the word, but rather the trait which allows people to successfully navigate complex social situations and bureaucracies, still providing enough motivation to work harder in their chosen fields. The question for the second part of outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit can play the same role. Gladwell presents the findings from studies into the causes of plane crashes and shows that Hofstede’s concept of power distance is critical, as accidents often occurred where co-pilots form cultures with a high power distance were far more likely not to challenge poor decisions of pilots. He traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant factor in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowballs significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more programmed due to the felicity of the language.
Furthermore Gladwell presents information showing that the countries with a legacy of rice growing, which requires a far greater level of input, concentration and hard work are shown to continue to apply that work ethic with regard to studying, yet the reason why poor kids do worse in school is largely to do with how little time they spend studying outside of school. It has to be noted though, this sort of thinking might lead to a self-fulfilling prophesy whereby you end up not putting enough effort since your life circumstances aren’t ideal. Then again, there is a dilemma, though life circumstances may make things easier, a man with no insecurities has nothing to motivate himself.

Animated book summary - https://youtu.be/OpuZoSK0JfY