Lexington, KY - I was recently asked if there were any young, new business authors that were on my 'must read' list.
"Yes," I replied immediately. "Malcolm Gladwell."
Gladwell's first two best-sellers, The Tipping Point and Blink got us talking about the impact of viral ideas and the importance of gut reactions, both topics with broad business implications. Now, the just-released third book in a Gladwell trilogy, Outliers: The Story of Success, asks us to reconsider our ideas on success.
Success has become a more puzzling dilemma in the current economic crisis; Gladwell's take on it is provocative and challenging. Outliers is not a success book of the self-help genre; rather it presents the argument that the way we look at success is profoundly wrong.
For Gladwell's purposes, outliers are men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. His list of examples includes business tycoons, rock stars and geniuses. But he doesn't limit outliers to individuals - we're asked to consider larger questions such as why Asians are good at math or why the majority of successful hockey players are born in January, February or March.
In Outliers, Gladwell wants to convince us that the personal explanations of success don't work. Using this argument, the Horatio Alger story of rising from nothing is largely a myth. The "self-made man," as even Jeb Bush, the son of one American president, the brother of another and the grandson of a wealthy senator, called himself is often a self-serving label that fits conveniently into our society's definition of success.
Success may occur for reasons that seem obvious but are often not considered. Gladwell, a Canadian by birth, shows that the majority of hockey players are born in the first quarter of the year with only 10 percent born in the last quarter. Here's his explanation: the cutoff date for youth hockey leagues is Jan. 1 so children born early in the year are generally larger and stronger than those born later. The older group gets more playing time and better training so that they develop a real advantage.
Success also has little to do with IQ, another myth Gladwell seeks to debunk. He uses the example of the number of Nobel laureates who are not from top-ranked schools. Success has more to do with your emotional/practical intelligence and opportunity your IQ. Gladwell hits upon the number 10,000 as the amount of hours you need to spend learning a skill in order to become an expert. The Beatles, Gladwell suggests, really developed due to playing long hours in German nightclubs. This opportunity to perform extensively is what finely-tuned their music.
Using Bill Gates as another example, Gladwell suggests that the entrepreneur's circumstances played into his success more than any other factor. Gates's high school happened to have a computer club when most schools did not. He had the good fortune of using the computers at the University of Washington as well. By the time he was 20, he had logged over 10,000 hours as a programmer.
While the story of this 13-year-old computer geek who became one of the wealthiest men in the world is fascinating, Gladwell suggests that we take a different lesson from his success. "Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?" he writes.
Of particular interest to Kentucky readers is the chapter entitled, "Harlan, Kentucky: 'Die like a man, like your brother did?'" Here Gladwell gleans from a host of well-known writers from the Commonwealth, including Harry M. Caudill, John Ed Pearce, and sociologist Paul Cressey. The chapter explores the "culture of honor" hypothesis that says success is formed not only by where you're from or where your parents and grandparents grew up, but extends back many generations. This cultural legacy is a powerful force that persists even when the economic and social conditions that created it are gone.
It's important to keep in mind that Gladwell is not a sociologist or anthropologist, but a journalist. As such, he synthesizes his research in a way that is palatable and pleasurable for everyday reading and leaves you thinking about his conclusions. IQ, experience and family background all play into success, but most of all, it is what we do with these various factors that determines the outcome. Outliers may not outline a how-to approach to success, but it will make you think about making the best choices to ensure opportunities for it.