Malcolm Gladwell shot to fame when his first book ‘The Tipping Point’ was released in 2000, and ‘Outliers’ – his third book – is arguably his most famous.
The most often quoted part of the book is his view that 10,000 hours is the magic number to achieve mastery of a given skill. This fact is often misquoted and misunderstood, but is nonetheless a core concept in a book focused on explaining why and how we concentrate on the wrong things when understanding how someone became successful, rich and famous.
Personally, I love Gladwell’s style of writing, he is entertaining at the same time as being very convincing in his fundamental argument, backed up by his story-telling of many individuals lives.
Before I get onto my notes and quotes from the book, I want to highlight the 8 key lessons I learned from reading the book:
Luck plays a massive role is someone’s success – We often forget this fact, but when we look through a different perspective it is easy to see the amount of luck there is in everyone’s success, no-one at the top got themselves there purely on their own brilliance.
The media has a terrible habit of focusing on the wrong reasons why someone has reached the top – The media are guilty of putting successful individuals on a pedestal and glossing over the luck or particular circumstances that played such a large role in someone’s rise to the pinnacle.
Even with extraordinary luck you still need to work very hard – Just because luck has a massive role doesn’t mean these individuals were destined to rise to the top, thousands of people may have had the same lucky circumstances as they did, but not all put in the effort or dedication to reach the top.
Intelligence and achievement are far from perfectly correlated – Intelligence is an enabler up to a point but after a certain point – around 115 QI score according to Gladwell – it stops helping. For the majority of people, a lack of intelligence isn’t holding them back, so they need to stop using as an excuse to better themselves.
‘Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds’ – Related to the hard work point above, persistence and doggedness are also fundamental requirements, I love this quote!
‘The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all’ – I hope people don’t see me choosing this as giving away the ending of the book, but I think it really captures the point of the book very well. Gladwell argues that once you’ve broken things down it is clear what it takes to be successful; you need a level of talent, hard work (10,000 hours+), persistence, doggedness and a bucket load of luck. That’s it. Whilst knowing this doesn’t necessarily help to get better in your own area of focus it does help remind you that looking for some sort of ‘secret’ or continually saying you can’t achieve something because you aren’t clever enough is total rubbish.
Why do we still have a long summer holiday at school? Gladwell offers a great argument for why abolishing these long holidays would help improve equality within western society. The argument seems so obvious the way Gladwell puts it, incredible!
Detailed below are the key messages and themes which resonated with me, however if any of the below lessons have sparked your interest I’d suggest you read the book yourself, you can find it here. As always anything in speech marks is a direct quote from the book.
Book Notes
Part 1
Opportunity
The Matthew Effect: Accumulative Advantage — ‘It is those who are successful…who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine & ten-year olds who get the most coaching and practice [in Canadian Hockey]’
10,000 Hours
‘The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours’
‘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 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 the product of the world in which they grew up’ [e.g. Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Canadian Hockey Players]
The Trouble with Geniuses
‘Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity’
Intelligence, such as IQ score, is good indicator but only up to a point. Once you cross the 115 mark for IQ you are ‘smart enough’ and likely to do as well in life as someone with a 180 IQ
Intelligence and achievement are far from perfectly correlated
‘Practical Intelligence’:
‘knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect’ (Robert Sternberg).
‘it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it’
Very different to the IQ type of intelligence.
General Intelligence (IQ) is important up to a point (estimates say it is around 50% hortatory) but to really succeed you need practical intelligence which comes from culture, and usually middle-class parenting.
‘No one…ever makes it alone’
The 3 Lessons of Joe Flom
1. The Importance of Being Jewish…’He [Joe Flom] didn’t triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity’
2. Demographic Luck…Being born in 1930s was very lucky, because there wasn’t many of you (Great Depression) but had excellent facilities [e.g. schools] built for much larger generations
3. The Garment Industry & Meaningful Work…’Autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying’
‘Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning’
Where would the perfect lawyer today come from? Born in 1930 or 1931 ‘demographic trough, so as to have had the best of New York’s public schools and the easiest time in the job market. He will be Jewish, of course, and so, locked out of the old-line downtown law firms on account of his ‘antecedents’. This person’s parents will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. A good school…will have been attended. He need not have been the smartest in the class, only smart enough’
Part 2 – Legacy
Harlan, Kentucky
‘He has to be willing to fight in response to even the slightest challenge to his reputation – and that’s what a ”culture of honour” means. It’s a world where a man’s reputation is at the centre of his livelihood and self-worth.’
‘Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing Aristides and behaviour that we cannot make sense of our world without them’
‘So far in Outliers we’ve seen that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages: when and where you are born, what your parents did for a living, and what the circumstances of your upbringing were all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world. The question in the second part of Outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebears can play the same role’
The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
Highlights that countries with a high-power distance communication culture has much higher number of plane crashes. If subordinates aren’t going to call out when they think things are going wrong, planes crash.
‘When we understand what it really means to be a good pilot – when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success – then we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair at an airline where pilots crash planes into the side of mountains. We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.’
Rice Paddies & Math Tests
‘Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gives those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty. That lesson has served Asians well in many endeavours but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics’
‘We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have ”it’ or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds’
Marita’s Bargain
‘Virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school,’ e.g. over the long summer break.
School works for children from all income levels, the reason middle & upper-class kids do better than poor in state school is all about the learning during the summer
‘For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem’
‘Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them’
We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think Outliers spring naturally from the earth…To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.’ Put another way, everyone should be given the chance to be exceptional.
A Jamaican Story
‘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’
