Outliers

The book’s subtitle presents the main theme of the book: “The Story of Success.” Gladwell largely addresses this in terms of how to attain success and how we perceive it. In Chapter 1, he asserts that the way we think about success is “profoundly wrong” (18). Too often we view it as the result of individual hard work, even innate genius, that allows a few people to rise to the top of their respective fields. Gladwell’s argument is that success is more mundane than that, more predictable, and arises from one’s background and the systems we put in place to select people in the first place and then provide them with advantages.

It’s important to note that Gladwell does not discount the existence of innate ability or the value of hard work. These are required for success, but that’s not the entire story. Many people are born with ability, and many put in great effort. The effort, however, must be herculean to reach elite status in any field. Presenting both research and the personal stories of people like Bill Gates and the Beatles, Gladwell writes that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary to master most any skill. This in turn requires an enormous amount of free time. Some can reach this level of practice while beginning to work in their field, as the Beatles did by playing long gigs in Hamburg, Germany, before they burst onto the world scene in 1964. Many others, however, need the leisure time afforded by a comfortable background, as in the case of Bill Gates.

Another factor is how people are chosen in areas that have an organized system for selecting the top individuals in a field. Gladwell shows that for elite sports and education, it comes down to age and at what point in the calendar year one is born. Both sports programs and education have cutoff dates for each cohort, starting when children are quite young. Research has shown that the majority of those selected for specific programs have birth dates earlier in the cutoff period, simply because they are developmentally ahead of their peers whose birthdays come some months later. Once in the program, these children gain “accumulative advantage.” That is, what began as a slight difference in development “leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on” (30-31). Finally, other intangible factors are usually necessary for breakthrough success, such as being in the right place at the right time and unplanned events that arise and are outside anyone’s control. 

Gladwell focuses on this theme in Chapter 6 as he introduces the culture of honor that pervades much of the American South. Gladwell traces this to settlers from the harsh borderlands of the United Kingdom, where it was a prominent feature of mountainous areas that depended on herding for their livelihood. Research at the University of Michigan has shown how persistent such cultural influence can be, as a culture of honor among Southerners remained strong generations later, even among people whose heritage was not British and whose family background was middle-class suburban.

The author then devotes the next two chapters to developing this theme. He examines in depth the role South Korean culture played in a series of plane crashes in the 1980s and 1990s, and he posits a theory that the culture of rice cultivation in Asia has contributed to those countries producing the best students in mathematics. He fits this cultural element into the concept of success by arguing that if we acknowledge the strength of cultural influences on people’s behavior, we can work to change aspects of it when it interferes with success. This was the case when an American trainer from Delta Air Lines worked with Korean Air pilots to change the culture of deference they had—in part by having them speak only English in the cockpit, adopting a new “identity” in a sense that allowed them to speak up more when they detected a problem.