I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers last week and I really enjoyed it. If you looked at my recent posts you could see that I essentially am finding ways to read a bunch of the books I wanted to read over the past five years. Outliers was one I have wanted to get to for a while.
The idea essentially is that our tendency to attribute success to personal greatness really undermines the systemic variables that result in exceptional success in time. So small or unique advantages at a point in time end up creating opportunities, that if stewarded by hard work and investment, can result in exceptional performance.
I think it injects a lot of humility into the discussion about “greatness” and it touches a lot of areas of society. No one should be taking all the credit for their success. Examples in the book include the Beatles, Bill Gates, professional hockey players, and many other in society. It shows how these people took advantage of small advantages when they came and over time they led to exceptional performance.
The parts of the book I was most intrigued though was the back half of the book that explored areas of education related to economic disparity, marginalization, and culture. There is also a discussion about how ancient farming and irrigation practices impact many Asian countries and cultures’ performance in math. It made me want to have my kids spend some time working rice fields. These are all contexts in which economics, culture, luck, fortune, and family heritage end up creating a systemic environment for some people to have small advantages that can, through hard work and discipline over time, but turned into excellence. But keep in mind, that time of practice and experience needed for greatness is estimated to be about 10,000 hours.
I have heard a lot about this book and the ideas over the last many years, but one of the main ideas that really surprised me and that I appreciated was the question Gladwell raises not about how we can be great, but about how we can offer opportunities for currently marginalized or disadvantaged segments of society to experience that same kind of greatness.
I think the example of education for economically disadvantaged communities stood out significantly – there’s many variables that if institutions and leaders targeted them intentionally, could help create an authentic level playing field. Instead of preaching that life is a level playing field – where success is only a matter of effort, it’s being more realistic about the ways small advantages lead to large advantages and working to create places where all have an opportunity to achieve excellence if they are willing to do work hard.
So this book is less about how to achieve success as I originally thought, but more about how to understand what factors lead to success over time and how we can work to get the best out of everyone and not just the advantaged.
