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Monday, March 23, 2009

Outliers: A Review

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I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" yesterday. The book challenges how we look at success.

In a nutshell, if you had two people that were equally driven, equally intelligent, and equally motivated to succeed, the thing that could determine who would be a better success than the other would actually be things beyond their control. These would be things like their age, their culture, their upbringing.

As a matter of fact, the book lists a lot of people--people whom we recognize as successful businessmen--who simply had the luck of being at the right place at the right time, and at that critical time of opportunity possessed the right amount of training required to pull ahead of the pack and be successful.

Simply put, it's nature and nurture. And the one who has both on his side is more likely to succeed than the person who only has one or the other.

Seems like a no-brainer when I summarize it like that, but I'm oversimplifying it. The book is surprisingly interactive. It starts off with something like, "Look at this chart and see if you notice something." And then it walks you through the results, and then based on those results it questions and challenges your personal assumptions about success, and then as the final blow, proves its point with studies that have very compelling data. It was logical, and I enjoyed the way it was able to involve me in the process.

That being said, I think Outliers started out very strong. Towards the end though, it kind of fizzled out for me.

By the time I got to part 2 (which is 2/3 the way through), I'd been thoroughly convinced that yes, success is not all about just one person's efforts. I get it.

Now what? Well, it didn't really say.

I have to confess I was looking for Gladwell to give some sort of hopeful message for those who didn't have a good experience growing up. Something like, "Okay so let's say you've got the chips stacked against you. You can still be successful. Just look at this person, and that person--they managed to do it, and here's why."

But he doesn't. And because he doesn't, when I finished the book, I was left with a strange feeling of, "it's not complete." He makes such a strong case for the role of nurture, that I felt if I was someone who only had nature on my side, I'd feel doomed.

That's not his intent, of course. On his website, he answers precisely that question.

Doesn't that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual's control?
I don't mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I'm not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there's a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

It's a fascinating book--I just felt it stopped short. It's not a good enough reason NOT to read the book. I may have one point against it, but I walked away with at least five other things that have forever changed the way I look at (and analyze) success :-).

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