Book Review: Outliers (2008)

By the Boiler Room Elves

Lately, some of the Elves have been hitting the books. We Elves like easy-to-read books filled with shocking information. Ok, really we like books with very plain covers. Hence, we're fans of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) and we just got around to reading his latest work Outliers. We liked this a lot. Gladwell, a former writer for the Washington Post and the New Yorker, has an easy style that goes down like spiked eggnog, and the information presented in Outliers is truly eye opening.

Outliers is about the secret of high level success. As Americans we’re usually told that "if you're willing to work hard, you can achieve anything and have all the success you want." Gladwell says that’s not true, and he points out repeatedly just how much success depends on luck or environment or culture.

*** SPOILERS ****

According to Gladwell, success results from a combination of luck and what he calls the “10,000 hour rule.” Gladwell claims that it takes the right environment to nurture a talent and that, even in the right environment, it then takes about 10,000 hours of practice in a particular endeavor before a person can truly shape their talent. To support this, he points out how Bill Gates spent 10,000 hours programming before he achieved his success. He finds that the Beatles spent 10,000 hours playing live in Hamburg before returning to England to strike it big. And so on.

He also discusses the influence of luck on success. For that, he first tackles sports. Everyone knows what it takes to become a world class athlete, no? Natural talent! Actually, no! Gladwell took a look at the world of professional hockey in Canada (the best of the best of the best, SIR!) and he discovered something interesting. He found that the vast majority of Canada’s best professional hockey players had birthdays in the first few months of the year. Why would this matter?

In Canada, youth hockey leagues cut off eligibility based on age on December 31st. Thus, if you are born on January 1, you will be lumped into a league with kids who can be as much as 364 days younger than you. When it comes times to determine which players should be placed on the “elite” teams, this age difference gives the older children a tremendous advantage, seeing as how the difference of nearly one year can be very dramatic at that age. A year of growth can really matter at age 8 or 9.

Once these bigger kids are selected for the elite teams, they get more ice time, better coaching, and are simply pushed harder. Over time, this builds up a greater and greater advantage for these kids over the children born later in the year. Eventually, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as these children go on to become the cream of the crop. Thus, it wasn’t talent that got them to where they ended up, it was the luck of the draw -- they were born at the right time to get all of the advantages the system gives. The kids born later in the year were not necessarily less talented, they were just born at the wrong time. Tough luck.

Gladwell next compares IQ to success. Unlike hockey, which is ultimately a team sport, IQ and what you do with it is a game for one -- it’s up to you to make the world your puffy, curly slipper. So is success the result of intellectual talent or something else? According to Gladwell, it’s about environment.

In the 1920's, researchers tested schoolchildren all over the country until they found almost 1,500 kids who qualified as "genius" on the IQ scale. The researchers intended to track them through their lives, convinced that they would become the doctors, philosophers, elves, and leaders of their generation. Not so much. Turns out, as adults they fell roughly into three groups: 20% were "successful"; 60% were average; and 20% were, well, not exactly what the researcher had hoped for (let's just say that Boiler Room Elves they were not.) Yet, they all had the same innate talent. So what gives? What made the difference? Environment.

The top group tended to have parents who graduated from college; the bottom group tended to have parents who dropped out of high school. The top group came from communities that challenged them and put their IQ to use, the bottom group didn’t. That was the real dividing line. It wasn’t pure talent that was the deciding factor for success, it was being lucky enough to be born into a family and community that made you use it.

This leads to an interesting discussion at the end of the book about the American school system. Why do children from other cultures consistently outscore American kids on all sorts of tests, particularly math. (Square root of a candy cane? Anyone? Anyone?) One potential culprit is our lengthy summer vacation, practiced basically nowhere else in the world. Gladwell discusses the findings of a researcher who examined test scores of schoolchildren in Baltimore, where they test at the beginning and end of the school year.

These kids were grouped into three socioeconomic groups: poor, middle class, and rich. Guess what he found? All the kids across all social classes learned roughly the same amount over the school year. In other words, their test scores went up by the same amount during the year. In fact, the poor group often learned more over the year than the wealthy group.

But something changed over the summer. The kids from wealthier families continued to improve over each summer, gaining anywhere from 10 to 15 points as a group during each of the years tracked. But poor kids lost ground almost every summer. Over 5 years, that meant that the upper class group got 50+ points better than the poor kids just because of what they did over the summers. Thus, Gladwell concludes that school isn’t failing our kids, summer vacation is.

What could account for this difference? Gladwell points out that wealthier families are more likely to send their kids to camp, to keep their kids reading, and to force them to be engaged and thinking. The poor families in which the kids might be on their own all day while their parents work don't have the same stimulus to nudge them along. But even the kids who did the best on the tests fell behind compared to the kids from other countries who did not get these long vacations. So how do we improve education? You drop the summer vacations and keep kids working. But good luck getting Americans to agree to giving up summer vacations - it's just not in our culture.

The book is an easy and interesting read. Gladwell uses many more examples that we haven’t touched upon. The Elves have enjoyed it very much and have been passing it around the Boiler Room. If you want to have your eyes opened to a different take on what it takes to be successful, pull on your stripy PJ's and give him a read.