Outliers (Book review)

Malcolm Gladwell Outliers (2008) This is an important book. It demonstrates that individual success depends on many factors beyond the individual’s control. They all come down to the same thing: you have to be in the right place at the right time, with the right personal and material resources. If you can then exploit the opportunity presented to you, you will be successful.
     One example of a factor that you can’t control is your birth date. The selection rules for players in amateur hockey leagues specify birth dates. If you are born near the beginning of the range of dates valid for you, you will be about one year older than your team mates born near the end of that range. That makes a lot of difference for young players: for 8-year-olds it’s a difference of about 12% in physical maturity, and sometimes more, given different rates of maturation. On average, the boys born in January will be taller, heavier, stronger, and more agile than those born in December. They will outshine their younger team mates, and will be more likely to advance to the next level of play.
     The same consideration applies to children’s school experience. It applies to whole generations: the people who were born in the 1940s grew to working age just as the baby boom got under way, and a huge demand for work ensued. I belong to that generation. It was easy for us to find work because there was huge and expanding demand for it.
     I’ve recently come across a snide remark about Gladwell’s method of framing a thesis, telling an illustrative story, then drawing wide-ranging conclusions. This is certainly a danger in inherent in Gladwell’s method. However, this book includes a lot of data, too, data that support Gladwell’s conclusions.
     In any case, anyone who insists that his or her success is entirely due their own efforts has a rather limited experience of life. There are undoubtedly many other people with the same talents and skills, and the same willingness to work hard, who did not succeed, simply because at some crucial point on their career path the opportunity they needed was not available. This is not to downplay the importance of hard work: there also people of similar skill and talent who did not take advantage of similar opportunities. But all of us have had success in large part because of things we could not have foreseen, people who offered us chances simply because we were there, and factors over which we had no control whatsoever.
     A book worth reading, especially since it prompts questions about how to adjust systemic factors which penalise so many talented people. ***