Outliers
The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell

Book Review

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell - Buy Now From Amazon

Reviewed by Marty Vanags

 

I attended a traffic school class last Saturday morning. If you don't know what that is, you have never been stopped by the police for say, a speeding ticket, and had the opportunity to enhance your education with this fine upper level (I'd say at least a 200 level course) program taught by a gregarious lawyer. Taking the class keeps the ticket off your record, and one can save on increased insurance costs in that way.

 

There all types of people in the class-everyone from a middle-aged lady who ran a stop sign to a couple teenagers and one very angry man who seemed to want to kill the teacher or anyone near him, although I am quite sure that he is the cause of his own problems. I am a great observer of people, at least I think so, and although the class was interesting, the many personalities in the class interested me more. You see, no one wants to be there, and the breaking of traffic laws is a great equalizer of class, socioeconomic status, age and gender. We were all equals in this class. We all got caught, and now we were trying to keep a traffic ticket off our record by attending the class.

 

No one in that class was better than the other in the handling of a vehicle. In some way or another we got caught. You can't be an expert in speeding or running red lights. You can't be an expert at eluding the police. One would have to have a lot of practice, and even though I have been driving for over 31 years, one little mistake by Redbird Arena created a new relationship between me and Officer Krupke and inevitably furthered my education in the area of safe driving.

 

In one of Malcolm Gladwell's books (the one a board member of mine borrowed and decided not to give back to me after Gladwell signed it), he talks of being stopped by police as well.  Malcolm Gladwell is a funny-looking guy.  In fact, he is funny-looking enough that he gets stopped from time to time by police because of the way he looks. Why is that?

 

Gladwell wrote Blink and Tipping Point, two popular books of the past several years. His books are popular because he writes about simple ideas that are borne of complexity. In Blink he writes about the moment we make a quick decision about something; in fact, he might say, a series of quick decisions about something. Barreling down College Avenue, my intuition told me that the police officer had his sights set on me and I was about to be nabbed.  I was right. Blink.

 

We often do this with people we meet for the first time. We usually make a quick decision about whether we are going to like someone fairly quickly. Sometimes we are right, but often we are mistaken. Some people would call this intuition, but Gladwell doesn't like this word. He says intuition is fraught with emotion.

 

In Tipping Point, an "intellectual adventure story" as Gladwell describes it, he examines the world of social epidemics. How does an epidemic spread through a population? He looks at teenage smoking, and he looks at a popular children's program that my own kids liked to watch called Blue's Clues. My daughters were fascinated by the program. It was an odd show because the animation was flat, and the simplicity of the whole thing was tremendously tedious. However, it apparently added to the intellectual capacity of not only my children, but also hundreds of thousands of other children. Gladwell takes epidemiology and psychology and uses them to break down social epidemics, the reasons for them and why it is important to understand them.

 

In both of these books and his new one, Outliers, Gladwell sets out to fully understand something. His writing is one of fully comprehending the simplest of concepts and laying siege to it in his great ability to conceptualize and develop his arguments. A Gladwell book is usually not very lengthy, but deep in rich detail and full comprehension of everyday life.

 

A year has 8,760 hours.  That is 24 hours multiplied by 365. Describing this puts into context a chapter Gladwell calls the "10,000-Hour Rule".  The Rule, as I will call it, is in Part One of the book titled "Opportunity."  Gladwell spells out why some people are more successful than others, and he attributes part of the formula to the Rule. The rule says that if a person has over 10,000 hours of experience in a given task or area of learning they will become very good at it, and the opportunities for them are really endless. So think of doing the same thing for 24 hours a day for 365 days of the year nonstop, add 52 and a half more days (January 1 through February 21), and you will have reached 10,000 hours.

 

One prime example used by Gladwell is the Beatles who, prior to being popular in Europe and eventually in the United States, had spent over 10,000 hours pounding out their version of rock n' roll  in strip clubs disguised as nightclubs in Hamburg, Germany. As Gladwell explains it, the Beatles traveled to Hamburg between 1960 and 1962 five times and performed over 270 times in this time period. Most Hamburg performances were between 6-8 hours long. Therefore, they had to learn not only their own songs, but many covers as well and as a result, they fine-tuned their performance. In the end they performed over 1,200 times in that brief time period, which is more than most artists might perform in a lifetime.  By the time 1964 rolled around they were a well-oiled machine and ready to impress the audience on the Ed Sullivan Show.

 

Gladwell use the Rule to explain the success of Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems and the prodigious genius that rewrote UNIX (the operating language for mainframe computers) and Java, which has had enormous impact on how we view the Internet. He also uses it to explain the success of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft; Canadian hockey players; and Mozart. They all had many opportunities in their lives that gave them the hours they needed-10,000 to be exact-to be very successful at what they do.

 

In part two of the book, Gladwell embarks on a "freakonomics" type of study of plane crashes. Recounting a Korean jet air crash on Guam, Gladwell looks at the cultural differences of language to explain a devastating crash in1997. He also uses Columbian airliner Avianca flight 052 in 1990 that crashed just outside Kennedy airport in New York City to describe language differences. How can language change the scope and tragedy of an airline accident? Certainly there are a whole host of other issues that cause airline crashes, but in the case of these crashes, much blame can be put on the way flight crew spoke to each other. Mitigation is the language officers are now taught, and Korea Air changed their safety record once they put aside cultural language niceties and were taught standardized procedure for challenging the captain and other communication issues in the cockpit. As a result, the safety record of airlines in recent years has improved dramatically.

 

Gladwell uses this chapter on language to describe how where you come from might have an impact on your success or, in the case of airline crashes, failure. Your cultural upbringing may force one to not challenge authority ("Captain, I think the plane is crashing!"), and thereby make one a statistic versus employee of the month.

 

Outliers is a book about understanding what makes a person successful. Certainly someone has a propensity for being talented in their specific endeavor. Whether is it music or computer programming, you must know your subject matter. However, it is a series of opportunities that are made available to individuals that can make or break their success.  Many times these opportunities are arbitrary, but often they are well thought out.

 

When Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes, spoke at our annual meeting in December he mentioned that the 1970s, a period of economic downturn, also was an era of great creation and growth. For example, he indicated the 1970s gave us Southwest Airlines, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Each era has its opportunities, and it is up to us to capture them. Can the Bloomington-Normal area capture new opportunities in this current economic downturn? Is there a Bill Gates lurking in the halls of Illinois State University or Illinois Wesleyan University?

 

Outliers' lesson is that we can revel in the success and greatness of these individuals and the way they have changed the world, but they are only a few. The challenge is to provide opportunity, access to education, access to capital and the opportunity to grow a business or excel in an endeavor to as many people as possible. Then, instead of one Bill Gates, we can have a whole crop of them.

 

Let's go back to traffic safety school. I have been driving for 31 years, and, let's say, I averaged an hour of driving each day for those 31 years. That is not hard to comprehend. Sure, there were days where I did not drive at all, but there were other days where I drove all day. So, I am pretty sure I can vouch for an average of an hour a day. Therefore, if my calculations are right, 31 years multiplied by an hour a day would give me 11,315 hours of driving in my lifetime. Am I an Outlier as described by Gladwell? I don't feel like an Outlier. And, it's obvious Officer Krupke doesn't think much of my experience either. I will search for my 10,000 hours somewhere else.