Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I had resisted reading Malcolm Gladwell until I realized that I had already read many of his articles in The New Yorker.  My prejudice was that I’m suspicious of popular nonfiction, and, unfairly or not, the reviews I read of his first bestseller, Blink, were mixed.  But when my friend John said that Outliers was an “epiphany,” or something to that effect, I picked up a copy to see what he found so compelling.  I’m glad I did.

First and foremost, Gladwell is a gifted and thoughtful reporter.  He’s really good at drilling down through what we call “common sense” to expose more revealing and occasionally startling truths.  In Outliers, Gladwell challenges the conventional notion about how successful people become successful -- uncovering some of the conditions that led to their extraordinary success and, in a few cases, spectacular failures.

He starts out simply, by examining the birthdates of the finalists in the Canadian junior hockey league playoffs.  Why is it that most of the players were born in January, February and March?  This pattern holds true not only for junior hockey but also for Canadian players in the NHL. Why?  Well, it turns out that until just a few years ago, no one noticed this pattern, much less questioned it, until a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley studied this phenomenon.

The answer, by the way, is that the deadline for signing kids to play is January 1^st.  A boy whose birthday is January 2^nd could be playing along side a boy whose birthday is twelve months later, on December 29th.  Think about the difference in physical maturity of a preadolescent ten-year-old born in January and one born months later.  At ten, there is a significant developmental difference between the two, with an overwhelming advantage going to the older kid.  What sets them apart is not only their age difference when they start out, but also the accumulated advantages heaped on the older player.  Year after year, the older player has more opportunities to play and, therefore, gains experience denied the younger player.  He is more likely to be picked for the traveling teams and of being selected for the more advanced hockey leagues.  Year after year, the older kid gains more and more experience, putting distance between him and his younger peers.  This experience pays off.

This is just one of many phenomena Malcolm Gladwell examines in this entertaining and insightful book.  The genesis of this book lies in his own family history, which he describes in the epilogue.  It comes down to two critical points; the amount of time you spend developing a skills – whether it’s programming a computer, playing an instrument or practicing law – and the circumstances into which you were lucky enough to have been born – and here I don’t mean wealth.  Whether you are Bill Gates, Bill Joy or Steve Jobs, who each caught the wave of computer technology, or members of the legal profession who caught the wave of mergers and acquisition law in the early sixties, personal circumstances and timing can be more important than genius.  Would Bill Gates have founded Microsoft and become a household name were it not for the fact that he had, literally, unprecedented, unlimited access to a mainframe computer in high school at a time when students were just being introduced to hand calculators?  Bill Gates himself attributes much of his success to this unusual circumstance, luck and timing.

Outliers goes well beyond a contemplation of how successful people got their start.  He also examines cultural issues.  For example, what explains the high incidence of airplane crashes of Korean Air in the 1980s and 90s, and what happened to turn that around?  And, why is it that Chinese students do better in math tests than almost any other cultural group?  And what was the cause of feuds in the Appalachians that resulted in more deaths per capita than anywhere else in America? And what did this pattern of violence have in common with the cultures of Sicily or the Basque region of Spain?  And why is an educational program started in the Bronx, where poor students outperform students in much more privileged communities, so successful?  Gladwell examines the KIPP middle schools and uncovers the conditions that have made such a difference in the lives of students there.

Sometimes you have to work at finding the thread that weaves these stories together, but that’s what makes this such a fascinating, insightful look at things most of us have not spent much time thinking about, but should.  Employing his exceptional reportorial skills, Malcolm Gladwell delights in delivering new surprise in every chapter, and that spirit of inquiry is contagious.  I’ll look forward to reading every book he writes from now on.