Summary:- Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell
This is a story of outliers - rockstars, computer geeks, hockey players and everyone who ever made it big. Here is a brief summary: -
If your kid wants to make it big in Canadian hockey and wasn't born in first four months of the year - well don't even think about it. And not only hockey it's true about soccer in Europe as well.
"Matthew Effect" as Malcolm calls it is this theory that chances of making into a sports team increases if you are physically mature than your peers and since cut off for age-class hockey in Canada is 1st Jan, this means that someone born on January 2 could very well be fighting for a spot with another kid who is born in December and this is in fact a significant advantage specially in pre- adolescence years.
A single key thing that can be traced in any outlier's success is the 10,000 hour rule. Which is as the name suggests to excel in any field one needs to invest 10,000 hours. And coupled with lucky breaks and right time in history you could very well be the richest person on earth (as is the case with Bill Gates - born in 1955 the ideal time if one wanted to reap benefits of personal computer revolution in 1975, picked up programming when he was still in school around the age of 13 and already 10,000 hours of programming experience under his belt when the right moment came).
And by my calculation if you're putting in 20 hours a week into something you intend to excel in, keep doing that for next 10 years and you might very well make big into it. Sounds about alright.
Now it wasn't just the hours - Bill Gates school had facilities to learn programming in 1960's and it wasn't the computer card type systems that was the norm in those days (which were extremely laborious) but much advanced systems which eventually made programming fun for Gates and his buddies.
Trouble with Higher IQs
In mid twentieth century Terman, a psychology professor in Stanford began a peculiar study. He chose a control sample of highly gifted kids - with an exceptionally higher IQ and started tracking them. He did so for the next few decades believing that his selected group of Termites would eventually advance science, government, welfare etc. in the US. However that never happened, on the contrary researchers now point out that had Terman choses any random sample of kids and tracked their progress he would have ended up with a group doing equivalent number of impressive things.
So what went wrong -
The answer is pretty straighforward - IQs can only get you this far, a higher IQ is very much like a player's height in basketball. It's definitely required but it's not the single most important factor, it's a threshold and once you're beyond a certain safe limit It doesn't really matter much.
Chris Langan and Oppenheimer are two character studies that Malcolm did to prove his point that how these two extremely gifted individuals had such different trajectories in life. Oppenheimer once tried to poison his teacher and despite that went on to lead the nuclear bomb project for US. On the other other hand Chris Langan, arguably the smartest man in America (IQ - 190+) didn't really achieve much as expected from someone of his potential. And the answer is the community around them as kids where they grew up, talent needs to be nurtured and it can't survive on it's own. Oppenheimer was born in a wealthy family his parents took great deal of interest in cultivating the right kind of atmosphere for their kid whereas Langan was born to a drunkard father and one couldn't hope for a more terrible childhood.
Thus what Oppenheimer had and Langan lacked was orthogonal to their IQs, it was practical intelligence. Where Oppenheimer knew how to win favors and turn on his charms at the right moment, Chris had to fare life on his own - alone.
Cultural Differences and Opportunities
A lot of it is luck but there is hard-work too. Why are Asians good at math. Why do equally smart kids from the lower income families tend to perform poorer compared to their richer counterparts and How much does your school matter and what's that summer break got to do with your kids academics.
Koreans are brilliant at math but what do Korean airlines disaster tell us about their pilots and society as a whole. Malcolm tells us to identify our strengths and acknowledge our weakness and each of us can be an outlier. More aptly put is there are no outliers - only that their success is because of history, community, opportunity and legacy.
If your kid wants to make it big in Canadian hockey and wasn't born in first four months of the year - well don't even think about it. And not only hockey it's true about soccer in Europe as well.
"Matthew Effect" as Malcolm calls it is this theory that chances of making into a sports team increases if you are physically mature than your peers and since cut off for age-class hockey in Canada is 1st Jan, this means that someone born on January 2 could very well be fighting for a spot with another kid who is born in December and this is in fact a significant advantage specially in pre- adolescence years.
A single key thing that can be traced in any outlier's success is the 10,000 hour rule. Which is as the name suggests to excel in any field one needs to invest 10,000 hours. And coupled with lucky breaks and right time in history you could very well be the richest person on earth (as is the case with Bill Gates - born in 1955 the ideal time if one wanted to reap benefits of personal computer revolution in 1975, picked up programming when he was still in school around the age of 13 and already 10,000 hours of programming experience under his belt when the right moment came).
And by my calculation if you're putting in 20 hours a week into something you intend to excel in, keep doing that for next 10 years and you might very well make big into it. Sounds about alright.
Now it wasn't just the hours - Bill Gates school had facilities to learn programming in 1960's and it wasn't the computer card type systems that was the norm in those days (which were extremely laborious) but much advanced systems which eventually made programming fun for Gates and his buddies.
Trouble with Higher IQs
In mid twentieth century Terman, a psychology professor in Stanford began a peculiar study. He chose a control sample of highly gifted kids - with an exceptionally higher IQ and started tracking them. He did so for the next few decades believing that his selected group of Termites would eventually advance science, government, welfare etc. in the US. However that never happened, on the contrary researchers now point out that had Terman choses any random sample of kids and tracked their progress he would have ended up with a group doing equivalent number of impressive things.
So what went wrong -
The answer is pretty straighforward - IQs can only get you this far, a higher IQ is very much like a player's height in basketball. It's definitely required but it's not the single most important factor, it's a threshold and once you're beyond a certain safe limit It doesn't really matter much.
Chris Langan and Oppenheimer are two character studies that Malcolm did to prove his point that how these two extremely gifted individuals had such different trajectories in life. Oppenheimer once tried to poison his teacher and despite that went on to lead the nuclear bomb project for US. On the other other hand Chris Langan, arguably the smartest man in America (IQ - 190+) didn't really achieve much as expected from someone of his potential. And the answer is the community around them as kids where they grew up, talent needs to be nurtured and it can't survive on it's own. Oppenheimer was born in a wealthy family his parents took great deal of interest in cultivating the right kind of atmosphere for their kid whereas Langan was born to a drunkard father and one couldn't hope for a more terrible childhood.
Thus what Oppenheimer had and Langan lacked was orthogonal to their IQs, it was practical intelligence. Where Oppenheimer knew how to win favors and turn on his charms at the right moment, Chris had to fare life on his own - alone.
Cultural Differences and Opportunities
A lot of it is luck but there is hard-work too. Why are Asians good at math. Why do equally smart kids from the lower income families tend to perform poorer compared to their richer counterparts and How much does your school matter and what's that summer break got to do with your kids academics.
Koreans are brilliant at math but what do Korean airlines disaster tell us about their pilots and society as a whole. Malcolm tells us to identify our strengths and acknowledge our weakness and each of us can be an outlier. More aptly put is there are no outliers - only that their success is because of history, community, opportunity and legacy.
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