Malcolm Gladwell on Outliers

I like Malcolm Gladwell, but after reading Blink I found that his ideas, usually written out in hundred-page books, can be summed up in a few paragraphs. So if you’re looking for a short summary of his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success, look no further than the excerpt published in this week’s Guardian. In a nutshell, someone practicing a certain craft (computer programming, violin, sports) for more than 10,000 hours  becomes do adept at it, that we mistakenly look for some innate abilities and call it talent.

There’s also the element of sheer luck of being at the right place at the right time that amounts to success – Bill Gates with access to computer programming resources and kits at an early age had a certain advantage over someone in Africa, who perhaps had the same business acumen, but did not have the resources readily accessible to become one of the world’s wealthiest businessmen. There’s an interview with Gladwell on CNN Money:

Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he’s 13, it’s 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle, and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that.

Posted Saturday, November 15th, 2008 under News, People.
  • http://www.sergeychernyshev.com Sergey Chernyshev

    Yep, but how many of those who used that terminal became as reach as Bill?

    Sergey

    P.S. Alex, why don’t you enable OpenID on your blog?

  • http://www.pavelvp.com pavel

    Well, for one thing, some famous violinist once said that it takes 1% of talent and 99% of hard work. Nowdays it does take genius to be able to spend over 10,000 hours diligently practicing one certain craft.

  • ari

    never read blink, but i agree from this experience that gladwell’s ideas can be summed up in a couple of paragraphs, or we could go one step further and sum them up in one word: unconvincing.

    he makes it sound like he’s uncovered some amazing revelation that all 3 cofounders of microsoft are the same age, but really it’d be more surprising to me if they were different ages. the thing with the violinists practicing proportional to their skill sounds like he may have gotten the causal link reversed – i posit that the most naturally gifted violinists are the ones that wind up practicing the most because it is most enjoyable to them/they have the greatest aspirations. 10,000 hours isn’t some magical number – it just tends to be a ballpark figure for how long someone has generally spent at something they’re obsessed with by the time they’re 22 (how many people NOT talented enough to make it into the article have spent 10k hours on something?).

  • Ben R

    Gladwell seems to overlook the findings from Dan Seligman’s book “A Question of Intelligence”, when attributing Asian math performance to rice cultivation and Jewish success in law on being born in NYC in 1930 & working in certain trades. Seligman notes the above average performance on jewish people on the verbal component of psychometric tests. The recent paper by Cochran & Harpending on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence indicated there was a genetic basis for this:

    “What accounts for this remarkable record? A full answer must call on many characteristics of Jewish culture, but intelligence has to be at the center of the answer. Jews have been found to have an unusually high mean intelligence as measured by IQ tests since the first Jewish samples were tested. (The widely repeated story that Jewish immigrants to this country in the early 20th century tested low on IQ is a canard.) Exactly how high has been difficult to pin down, because Jewish sub-samples in the available surveys are seldom perfectly representative. But it is currently accepted that the mean is somewhere in the range of 107 to 115, with 110 being a plausible compromise.

    The IQ mean for the American population is “normed” to be 100, with a standard deviation of 15. If the Jewish mean is 110, then the mathematics of the normal distribution says that the average Jew is at the 75th percentile. Underlying that mean in overall IQ is a consistent pattern on IQ subtests: Jews are only about average on the subtests measuring visuo-spatial skills, but extremely high on subtests that measure verbal and reasoning skills.”

    The three authors conclude this part of their argument with an elegant corollary that matches the known test profiles of today’s Ashkenazim with the historical experience of their ancestors:

    The suggested selective process explains the pattern of mental abilities in Ashkenazi Jews: high verbal and mathematical ability but relatively low spatio-visual ability. Verbal and mathematical talent helped medieval businessmen succeed, while spatio-visual abilities were irrelevant.
    The rest of their presentation is a lengthy and technical discussion of the genetics of selection for IQ, indirect evidence linking elevated Jewish IQ with a variety of genetically based diseases found among Ashkenazim, and evidence that most of these selection effects have occurred within the last 1,200 years.”

    In terms of East Asian math/science performance, Seligman notes they tend to perform above average on the non-verbal component of psychometric tests which is consistent with the math/science performance:

    “Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile “selection pressure” for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn’s 1987 paper refers to “the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain.” These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world’s best visuospatial abilities.”

  • Alan

    Sure the book has a simple concept. It takes that much anecdotal evidence to support his case. Yet I think many people here are missing the important point: Talent alone doesn’t determine success. A supportive environment is also very important.

    Yes, only talented violinists ever put in the 10000 hours, but the point is that other talented violinists who don’t do that work never make it. And talented violinists who are discouraged by their context will rarely do the work, and the talent is wasted.

    Talented hockey players born in December don’t make the NHL. Talented computer programmers born in the ghetto don’t become billionaire software tycoons.

    If certain Jews have a higher IQ, that’s great. But they also have strong cultural support and various circumstances that all combine to lead to success. You cannot dismiss the latter by citing the former.

    Maybe Gladwell missed the boat on the math/rice subject, but on the whole the thesis is sound. Ultimately the point is for society to realize how many geniuses are not reaching the top, and think how we can do this better.

    Canada (Gladwell’s home country) came in last (among the richer countries) in Unicef’s study of how much social support is given to developing children. This fact means poor children in Canada fall behind in school by a substantial percentage, and thus Canada misses out on half of its potential for great citizens. (Africa misses out by an even greater margin because of poverty).

    The challenge is to provide people an environment where they can succeed.