Outliers: Audiobook

Outliers is the third offering from Malcolm Gladwell.  His book Blink was reviewed previously on this blog.  Outliers can be called a pop-economics book like Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist, because it looks at the hidden causes of situations.  It's not an economics book per-say, but it's core is the price/cost of achieving and succeeding and the hidden factors.  It really follows the trend of the other books.  I found this book to be more interesting and more helpful than Blink.  I think the basis for the book has more real support and application.

Malcolm Gladwell chose an interesting topic to start the book, one that made me very angry at my parents.  Apparently 40% of NHL players were born in in the months from January-March.  Thirty percent in the following three months and so on.  Being both a January baby and a Hockey fan, my parents should have known to move to Canada when I was two so I could have my chance.  I could have been the next Wayne Gretzky.

In all seriousness, Gladwell addresses topics that I would say fall into the common-sense category.  Not literally, more that what he says is the unspoken wisdom about certain things.  The book is about those who succeed and why.  Not just succeed, but the outliers who surpass everybody else.  Why are they so super-successful?  According to Gladwell it boils down to two main things, hard work and luck.  He's states that it takes about 10,000 hours to become truly expert and proficient at a task.  That works out to about 10 years.  The earlier you get the 10,000 hours in, the better.  You'll be ahead of the curve.

Gladwell tackles his topic by looking at various fields, starting with the Hockey example.  He moves on to the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joys of the world and then to the corporate take-over lawyers in NY City.  There are other outliers interspersed as well, including The Beatles, Asians and math, and Korean Air.  I will talk mainly about the first three examples and let you read the book (or listen to the audiobook) for yourself.

Why is the NHL comprised of so many people from the first three months of the year?  The answer lies in the fact that the cut off to sign up for hockey is on January 1.  All the kids that missed the cut-off have to wait a whole year to sign up.  By that time they are bigger and more mature than some of the other kids signing up born later in the year.  Early in life this constitutes a significant difference.  When these JFM (Jan/Feb/Mar) kids play, they are seen as being better, because they are better, but not because they necessarily possess more natural skill.  They just happen to have mature enough to stand out a little bit more than their peers.  As a result, they have more opportunities at the All-Star teams and upper leagues.  They end up with better coaching and more difficult challenges that make them much better.

This phenomenon is not just with Hockey, it's found in Soccer (Football), and Baseball.  The largest populations of players come from the group born just after the cut-off date.  It even happens in school where the kids born just after the cut-off a greater advantage over the kids born just before it.  The reason for the success of these kids is due to chance, when they were born.

How do the Bill Gates and the other computer billionaires fit the bill.  Well, they were all born in the years of 1954 and 1955.  In fact Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joy were born withing 6 months of each other.  Why is this significant?  When the personal computer was coming into being, these folks were at the perfect age at which jump into the field.  The other thing they had in common was the opportunity to learn computers.  Bill Gates had the opportunity to program one of the few on-line computers in the world during his Jr. High and High School years.  By the time computers were making there way to the mainstream, Gates had years of experience beyond his peers.  His birth year was key, because it put him at the age when he could take advantage of the opportunity.  A couple years older and he'd probably have a steady job at IBM and not willing to take a chance.  A couple years younger and he'd have missed the window.  The same goes for Steve Jobs and Bill Joy, as well as a number of the other computer pioneers.

Another group are the Jewish lawyers who specialized in corporate take-overs.  The birth year was important, but their ethnicity was more important.  When they graduated law school, they went to the big NY firms, but were generally rejected, because they were Jewish.  As a result, many signed up with small firms and often took whatever business came in the door.  At the time, corporate take-overs were considered beneath the big law firms, thus these Jewish lawyers ended up with much of the business.  Over the years, this kind of law became more important and the Jewish lawyers reaped the rewards.  The other law firms were far behind the curve and had trouble catching up.  The Jewish lawyers had years, 10-20 years of experience and expertise in this field of law.

From this book I take home the message that hard work is essential to success, but so is luck and opportunity.  None of the people mentioned would be where they are without the hard work.  The opportunities and luck were just as important.  As Gladwell states, there is no such thing as a self-made man.  It's a myth.  We are a composition of out genetics, family history, and opportunities.  I think that in general Gladwell is right.  I do think there some areas that could be improved on the book.

I think that Gladwell does well in emphasizing the hard work and luck that plays a role in the lives of the successful.  Even Bill Gates has stated that he could not be where he is without the opportunities he's been given in life.  Gladwell I think puts too much emphasis on these two areas.  Other factors are also involved that he doesn't address.  He doesn't touch on genetics enough.  Some of us are just wired to be successful at certain kinds of tasks, whereas others may not be wired to be as successful.  That's as important as any other factor.  We are nor born blank slates.

He also misses the fact that interest plays an important role.  Why do the kids play hockey and stay with it? Why did Bill Gates spend so much time programming?  Why did these Jewish folks go to law school in the first place?  I think that drive and ambition are central for success.  The people who are successful would likely be successful no matter what, at least in most cases.  It's the luck and the interest factors that I think shot them into the stratosphere.  If not these folks, we'd be talking about somebody else.

The book is about why certain folks are outliers, so maybe that's why he didn't touch on the two areas I mentioned.  I still think they should have been discussed more.  Overall I thought this was a very interesting book and well worth the time.