Notes on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008).

When I finished reading this book, I said to myself: "Very interesting. What was this about,
again?" Arcane bits of research from psychology, sociology, and business history are woven
together so entertainingly, what had seemed to stick with me were some of the fun facts and
more compelling story lines--did you know that Roseto, Pennsylvania was renowned in medical
circles for its low rate of heart disease, and it had nothing to do with the Mediterranean diet of its
Italian immigrant population? That the real reason the Beatles were so great had to do with all of
the strip club gigs they played in Hamburg? That most top-notch hockey players from Canada
are born in January, February, or March?
But I knew that there was more of a point to the book than that, due to an interview I'd heard
with the author on the radio. The "story of success" he wants to tell is not profile after profile of
successful individuals who worked hard and pulled themselves up by the bootstraps, or who
were born with such innate genius that they were destined for greatness. Rather, his idea is to
examine statistical outliers--extraordinarily successful (and, in some cases, unsuccessful)
individuals and groups--in terms not only of their own efforts but also the social, historical, and
cultural contexts in which their behavior occurred.
I was able to remind myself of the book's main topic by skimming back over the individual
chapters and composing one-sentence summaries of the main point of each. Here they are:
Introduction: The Roseto Mystery
The anomalous good cardiopulmonary health of the residents of one small town in Pennsylvania
is due not to their virtuous diet and exercise habits but rather the mental health (especially the
low levels of stress) that they are able to achieve as a community.
PART ONE: OPPORTUNITY
Chapter 1: The Matthew Effect
Some people are born with situational advantages that allow them greater opportunities and
access, although these circumstances are often overlooked as they continue to get preferential
treatment through childhood and young adulthood due to their ostensibly superior talent and
ability. Or, as Billie Holiday sang, "Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose. That's
what the Bible says, and it still is news!"
Chapter 2: The 10,000 Hour Rule
There are no shortcuts; it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become truly excellent at
something, but that alone is an insufficient condition for success.
Chapter 3: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part I
IQ scores are practically useless for predicting professional success...
Chapter 4: The Trouble With Geniuses, Part II
...what is also required is "practical intelligence" in social situations, which one usually learns (or
not) from one's family while growing up.

Chapter 5: The Three Lessons of Joe Flom

Work hard, yes, but it sure does help to be born in the right place, in the right time, with the right
family background, even if none of those things seem "right" at the time.
PART TWO: LEGACY
Chapter 6: Harlan, Kentucky
Cultural legacies run deep and long, and we should not be timid about discussing openly how
they continue to affect us.
Chapter 7: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
Cultural attitudes concerning hierarchical authority have real life-or-death consequences in
airplane cockpits.
Chapter 8: Rice Paddies and Math Tests
Academic success in subjects like math follows directly in cultures that have developed an ethos
of working long hours at meaningful tasks.
Chapter 9: Marita's Bargain
The American educational system does not allow egalitarian access to success due to the
institution of long summer vacations, during which rich kids continue to learn and poor ones do
not.
Epilogue: A Jamaican Story
The career success of Gladwell's mixed-race mother from Jamaica was due to a series of happy
accidents.

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to
explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates
is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns
out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft
Corporation.

Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the
Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is
one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family,
culture, and class. Outliers those persons of exceptional accomplishment typically have
lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and
no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was
surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an
outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a
single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more
shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden
causes of their status.

Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all
born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on
individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement.
The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed
that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of
eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately
produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play
only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would
dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a
situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the
original false conception come true.

Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour
rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same
reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters,
both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in
10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at
the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with
some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at
essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were

absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both
achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that
level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in
society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles
played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time
they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000
hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level,
and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not
personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime
practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness,
validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is
no such thing as intelligence, only interest.

The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history.
However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand
ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his
adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of
what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said
to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the
ability to empathize.

Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom.
According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of
his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with
origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a
necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of
necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual
and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else
would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just
beginning to boom when they hit their stride.

Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the
present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a socalled culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing
but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in
defending themselves, their reputations and honor.

Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts 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. This chapter is
interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.

Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no
one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard,
intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical
synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which
outstrips growers of other crops. 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, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not
innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language
which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.

The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve
as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those
schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours,
which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular
pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is
bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may
modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of
culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds
laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.