Outliers: The Story of Success [Hardcover]

 

 

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I'm a fan of Malcolm Gladwell having read his previous Blink and The Tipping Point. All his books are about interesting topics and are told in a way that keeps the reader engaged. Similarly to the other books the criticism can always be made that he makes about 4-5 valid points and stretches them out to a full book but when the writing is engaging and takes you on a journey it doesn't really matter.

The book itself takes you through what drives success. Arguing that it's a combination of intelligence (both IQ and emotional intelligence), luck (opportunties and timing), cultural context and hard work (the much-reported 10,000 hours). All this could be argued to be fairly obvious but through the examples and anecdotes Gladwell dispelled many myths at the same time as entertaining.

All-in-all a good read.

Malcolm Gladwell, I learned from his website, is a writer for the New Yorker. His website has an archive of his New Yorker articles.

I found "Outliers" an interesting read, starting off with the theme that successful people happen to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right talent, the right motivation and the right accumulation of experience already under their belt. From then the book jumps around, each chapter having an interesting theme but without much connection with the other chapters. The last chapter recounts how Malcolm Gladwell's mother, born and raised in Jamaica, eventually came to live in a beautiful house on a hill in the Canadian countryside.

I got the feeling I was reading a succession of "New Yorker" articles, each one interesting but slightly superficial - and with no common theme being built up.

Overall, I was disappointed and felt that the book had been oversold. The back cover says:

"This book will change the way you think about your life. And it will challenge you to make the most of your own potential".

In my view, that is simply overselling the book. It provided a pleasant read, whiling away a couple of evenings, but no more than that.

A criticism common to both Malcolm Gladwell's previous books, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, was that while they were packed with interesting, well told, anecdotes there was no consistent underlying theme to the stories; no particular lesson to be drawn. For example, of the many anecdotes recounted about "thin slicing" some (such as an art expert's ability to instantly assess the bona fides of a statue) suggested it was a special and important skill while others (an impulsive police decision to pursue and shoot dead a innocent bystander) suggested quite the opposite. You were left with the impression that, well, there are these things called snap judgements, and sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don't.

Clearly Malcolm Gladwell has taken those reservations to heart: in Outliers he has been scrupulous to sketch out an integrated underlying thesis and then (for the most part) array his anecdotes - which, as usual, are interesting enough - in support of it.

Unfortunately for him, the theory is a lemon. Nonetheless, the flyleaf is hubristic (and unimaginative) enough to claim "This book really will change the way you think about your life". It's not done that for me, but it has changed the way I think about Malcolm Gladwell's writing. And not for the better.

Gladwell has looked at some psychological research into success and genius and has concluded that, contrary to conventional wisdom, success isn't to be explained by raw talent. The evidence suggests that genuinely exceptional performers, in whatever field - these are the titular "outliers" - can be identified by a combination of unique and unusual *opportunity* and *commitment* to achieve. It isn't talent, but graft and the odd lucky break. Hmm.

A common thread, Gladwell claims, is that most "world class experts", be they "composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, what have you ..." have put in 10,000 hours of practice before really achieving success. So, as the paradigm case goes, the Beatles weren't just in the right place at the right time (though clearly they were), but were instead preternaturally prepared for it by their grueling stint playing hundreds of eight-hour shows in Hamburg, an experience which afforded them both the necessary period of time and unusual opportunity to gain musical proficiency.

The first quibble here is to note that (even allowing for the patent fantasy that the Beatles played eight-hours non stop each night), on Gladwell's own figures, the Hamburg experience - which didn't involve Ringo Starr - still left the band roughly 8,000 hours short of their necessary 10,000. In any case attributing the Beatles' success to their (undisputed) musical proficiency indicates the degree to which Gladwell misses the point, both about rock 'n' roll (wherein neither concerted effort nor musical acumen has often had much to do with initial commercial success - just ask Elvis or the Rolling Stones) and the quality of the data itself. Gladwell's theory suffers from survivor bias: it starts with an undisputed result (the Beatles - clearly an outlier) and works back looking for evidence to support its hypothesis and takes whatever is there: easy enough to do since the "evidence" is definable only in terms of the subsequently occuring success. In less polite circles this is called revisionism.

There will, after all, be no record of the poor loser who spent 10,000 hours at his fretboard and who squandered a wealth of opportunity through ineptitude or bad luck, because, by definition, he never caught the light. Even if you grant Gladwell his theory - and I'm not inclined to - the most that can be said is that he's found a *correlation* between graft and success. But to confuse correlation with causation is a cardinal sin of interpretation (see Stephen Jay Gould's splendid The Mismeasure of Man for a compelling explanation of this fallacy) unless you have independent supporting grounds to justify the causal chain. Gladwell offers none: The Fab Four (well, Fab Three plus Pete Best) may have become a tighter band in Germany, but as Gladwell acknowledges there were many Liverpool bands in Hamburg at the time, all presumably clocking up eight hours non-stop (yeah, right) per night, and none of the others made the cover of Rolling Stone then, or has done since.

Much of the rest of Gladwell's patter is similarly glib: look at any "success story" long enough and you're bound to find something in its past you can designate as the crucial 10,000 hours. But to imply - as Gladwell seems to - that it isn't special talent but nothing more than sheer grit and unique opportunity that creates Outliers seems fatuous, and liable to needlessly encourage a class of plodders who will end up very disappointed (and resentful of M. Gladwell, Esq.) in 10 years' time. It struck me when I listened to him speak in London last month that the 10,000 hours might just as easily be confirmation, rather than falsification, of the presence of raw talent. If you take two violinists, one tone deaf and the other unusually gifted, all else being equal, who is more likely to stick at it for the ten years it takes to achieve concert level proficiency?

To be sure there are some fascinating lessons to be drawn here, but precisely at the point where Gladwell allows himself to drift off the moorings of his underlying theory: ethnic theory of plane crashes, which seemed to establish very little about outliers even on his argument, is cogent (and in these melting markets, timely) caution as to the risks of autocratic behaviour. Towards the end of the book Gladwell reaches some uneasy conclusions that, based on the extraordinary results of Asian schoolchildren in mathematics, that US schools should effectively abandon summer holidays and have children attend school all year round, like they might if they were working in a rice paddy. I'm not convinced that more school (as opposed to better parenting) is the answer.

It was my fortune to be reading Steve Gould's classic tome on scientific sceptism at the same time I read (and listened to) Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's prescriptions are analogous with the flawed IQ testing programmes Gould so elegantly takes to task: the hypothesis comes first, and the intellectual process behind it is the search for evidence in support of it rather than a dispassionate attempt to falsify. It is hard to imagine how one would go about falsifying (or proving, other than anecdotally) Gladwell's theory and even harder to conceive what prospective use Gladwell's learning, if true, could be. Seeing as the "golden opportunities" can only be identified with hindsight - once your outlier is already lying out there, this feels like the sort of junk science with all the trappings - and utility - of 20:20 rear vision.

Olly Buxton

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4.0 out of 5 stars Have read the whole book, quite OK.
The book is composed of short stories, some of them are quite inspring, some are not. But on the whole, I would say this book is worth reading. It does make me think.

Published 1 month ago by Betty

4.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable
I thought this was a remarkable book and highly thought provoking. So hard work really does and can pay off! There is world beyond high IQ. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Alexandra

5.0 out of 5 stars A book full of revelation
I read previous works from Malcolm Gladwell, such as blink and the tipping point and was looking forward to read this one; it is the same level of achievement. Read more

Published 2 months ago by Anma

3.0 out of 5 stars Subjective, Nuanced and Entertaining.
(Review of audiobook version read by Malcolm Gladwell himself)

This book confused me at the beginning. Read more

Published 2 months ago by S. GODFREY

5.0 out of 5 stars Just brilliant!
I can't rate this book high enough. It is both interesting and intellectual while still being extremely readable. Read more

Published 2 months ago by M. Wiltshire

5.0 out of 5 stars A recipe for success and contentment
This turned out to be one of the most significant books that I have ever read. I only wish I had received all the information and ideas earlier in my life. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Bert Barnsley

3.0 out of 5 stars Glad to be Well Informed; Sorry to be Ignorant
As usual I do enjoy Gladwell's easy-going style of writing. It's just that this particular book lacks cohesiveness, even if there is a theme, that leads me to downgrade it to an... Read more

Published 3 months ago by J. Nichols

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Read
Picked this up at the airport as was looking for a read on a long plane journey. Best book I've read this year. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Peter Weissler

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard work is a key factor
I am delighted to have read this book because it is a reaffirmation of many beliefs I had always believed in. Hard work is one of them. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Kamil M. Salamah

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Interesting
Outliers is a very interesting and very easy to read book. The main idea of the book is outlined on the first chapter and the rest is pretty much a few different applications of... Read more

Published 3 months ago by GeorgeG

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