Outliers: The Story of Success

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Author

Malcolm Gladwell, born 1963, British-born Canadian journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker since 1996. Little, Brown and Company, New York, November 2008. 309 pages.

His third book, following The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005).

Description

Gladwell's argument is that individual accounts of achievement systematically omit the conditions that made the achievement possible. Talent and effort are necessary and not sufficient, and the remainder is made up of birth date, family circumstance, cultural inheritance, and historical timing, none of which the successful person selected.

The book opens with Canadian junior hockey rosters, where a disproportionate number of players are born in January, February, and March. The eligibility cutoff falls on January 1, so a boy born in January competes against boys up to eleven months younger. At age eight the physical difference is visible, the older boy is selected for the better team, receives more coaching and more ice time, and the initial arbitrary advantage compounds into a real one. Gladwell calls this accumulated advantage, drawing on Robert Merton's Matthew effect.

The 10,000-hour rule is the book's most cited claim. Gladwell draws on K. Anders Ericsson's study of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music, where the students judged best had accumulated roughly ten thousand hours of practice by age twenty. He applies the figure to the Beatles, who played extended sets in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962, and to Bill Gates, who had access to a computer terminal at Lakeside School in 1968 when almost no adolescent in the world did.

The birth date argument returns for software. Gladwell notes that Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, and Bill Joy were all born between 1953 and 1956, old enough to be adults when personal computing arrived in 1975 and young enough not to be established in a corporate job.

The second half turns to cultural legacy. Gladwell examines Korean Air's accident record between 1988 and 1998 and attributes it to communication patterns in the cockpit, where a first officer would signal a problem indirectly rather than contradict a captain. The remedy, adopted after Delta Air Lines was brought in to review operations, involved conducting cockpit communication in English. He also treats rice paddy agriculture as an explanation for mathematics performance, arguing that the labor pattern of wet rice cultivation produces a disposition toward sustained effort on difficult problems.

The book closes with Gladwell's own family history in Jamaica, an account of how his mother's opportunities depended on colonial color hierarchy and a scholarship examination.

Relevance

The book's method is popularized structural analysis, arguing that what looks like individual capacity is often position within a system. That is the same move anthropology makes when it treats behavior as produced by social arrangement rather than by disposition, delivered to a general audience.

The technology material is the more directly applicable part. Gladwell's account of the 1953 to 1956 birth cohort is an argument that access to specific machines at a specific moment determines who gets to build the next generation of them, which is a claim about infrastructure rather than about people.

Criticism

The 10,000-hour rule has been disputed by the researcher whose work it rests on. Ericsson has stated that his study reported an average rather than a threshold, that the figure varied widely among the violinists studied, and that the operative concept is deliberate practice, meaning structured work at the edge of current ability under feedback, not accumulated hours of any kind. A 2014 meta-analysis by Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick, and Frederick Oswald found that deliberate practice accounted for 26 percent of variance in games, 21 percent in music, 18 percent in sports, and 4 percent in education.

The Korean Air chapter has drawn objection for cultural determinism. Critics have argued that the analysis relies on Geert Hofstede's power distance index in a way that treats national culture as a fixed explanatory variable, and that the airline's problems admit explanations in training regime, regulatory oversight, and equipment.

The wider methodological complaint is that the book selects cases that fit and does not test them against cases that do not. Every subject Gladwell examines succeeded, so the hidden advantages he identifies are never checked against the many people who had the same advantages and did not succeed.

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