Blogocentric Formulations

Outliers

I don't know how I've never read a book by Malcolm Gladwell until now. Right now I'm reading Outliers, a fascinating account and analysis of success... what contributes to making someone a professional athlete, or a bestselling author, or a brilliant software programmer. Or, for that matter, what makes someone a Michael Jordan or a Bill Gates among professional athletes and software programmers.

Turns out, the self-made man, pulling himself up by the bootstraps and succeeding solely on his own individual merit, is a myth. Success, Gladwell argues, is actually a combination of hard work and the opportunities and environment around the individual. For example, did you know there are ideal times to be born if you want to become a world-changing software programmer (1952-1958) or an entrepreneurial industrialist (1830-1840)? If you think that's crazy, consider that Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Novell), and all four of the Sun Microsystems founders (Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim) were born in 1955, 1953, 1956, 1955, 1955, 1954, 1954, 1955, and 1955, respectively. Or that fourteen of the seventy-five richest people in human history are all American industrialist entrepreneurs born in the same nine-year window between 1831 and 1840 (including John D. Rockefeller - 1839, Andrew Carnegie - 1835, and J.P. Morgan - 1837).

The purpose of the book is not to discount hard work and business savvy (all of these people needed the ability and the drive to take advantage of their opportunities), but the idea that Bill Gates made something from nothing with no help from anyone else is something that even Gates will admit is untrue. Everything about him, including the school he went to (or didn't go to ), the opportunities he received to work with computers at a young age, and even the date range of his formative years (just before he was old enough to get a desk job at IBM like every other programmer in search of a stable income to support a family and buy a house... and just after the advent of consumer-oriented computers and time-sharing servers that eliminated the tedious process of computer punch-cards and made programming a hundred times more efficient) etc. all converged to create an ideal opportunity for smart, capable men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Bill Joy to take advantage of and succeed in profound ways.

He also tackles some of our preconceived myths about success. Like, for example, that at some point IQ doesn't matter. There's a threshold (it's much lower than you might think!) after which it doesn't really matter what your IQ is. An IQ score of 180+ doesn't guarantee more success than someone with an IQ of 140. At some point, there's a level where your raw intelligence is good enough to give you the necessary tools to succeed, and after that, it's more about your practical intelligence, access to opportunity, number of hours you spend developing your abilities, and the environment around you. At some point, it's not about how smart you are; it's about your attitude and how well prepared you are to exploit the opportunities you're presented with.

Outliers is probably one of the most exceptional, fascinating books I've ever read. If you haven't read anything by Malcolm Gladwell before, I can't recommend it enough. After this, I'm going to read Blink (about the power of thinking without thinking), and his most well-known work to date: The Tipping Point, about how little things can make a big difference.