Book summary: Outliers

I picked up "Outliers" by Malcom Gladwell from San Francisco airport. Lately, my interests in reading fiction, in terms of getting value out off them, have gone down. I was scavenging through a display of books at a book store on the airport and found "Outliers". I checked its reviews online and it seemed like a pretty good read. Few of the fellow passengers, who saw the book in my hand, also heaped generous praises on the book.

In the book, the author attempts to throw light around the reasons behind the success and fame of some of the most successful people in the world namely Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Joseph Flom. The author states that the success and fame of these legends in their professions is not a simple equation based on  their intelligence, smartness and their ability to take risks. The timely opportunities that these legends had at various times in their professional careers and personal life played a significant role in their success. The author not only gives instances when these legends had their share of opportunities but further substantiates his claim by sighting instances of people whose mental ability and smartness was more than these legends but who failed to achieve similar greatness due to lack of favorable opportunities.

The author starts by taking a simple on how the month of birth of ice hockey players in United States had a major impact on their selection in different leagues across age groups. The author provides statistics that most players in professional leagues had been born in January, February, March and April while lesser number of players were born in later months (I doubt the origin of statistics but couldn't substantiate it). The author states that the cut off date for admission into a particular age group for ice hockey is January 1st which gives the kids born in earlier months significant advantage over kids born in later years in terms of physical ability and strength to play the sport over their peers who were born in the later months of that year. Such a small selection criteria creates a big impact on shaping the sporting careers for individuals is something which I hadn't heard about.

The author in subsequent chapters delves into more meaningful aspects of life like willingness to work hard to achieve perfection in a profession through the 10000 hour rule. It is said that to achieve recognition in a field of profession or art one requires to practice to practice his vocation for 10000 hours be computer programming or playing musical instruments. The author sites how opportunities for individuals like Bill Joy and Bill Gates and their own willingness to be good at something, gave them an extraordinary advantage to succeed in software industry. It was the Lakeside programming group in Seattle for Bill Gates which gave him enough time to practice and perfect programming for almost 10000 hours from an early time in his life. Bill Joy had similar exposure to computers and programming at his university. Of course Bill Gates went on to form Microsoft and Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Micro-systems.

Apart from the success the stories of legends in their profession and how opportunities played important role in their success, author also sites how the a person's demographic and family background plays a role in creating such opportunity. The author sites a sad example of Christopher Langan who is the world's smartest man with an IQ of 195. Christopher Langan hailed from an extremely poor family which had an impact on the opportunities he had to afford college education. Even though he was extremely intelligent, the author states that he dropped off from college twice, once because his family didn't have enough money to afford his college education and once because he didn't have the  patience and understanding for convincing his professor to allow him to attend afternoon lecture since he couldn't make in time for the morning class due to his broken car. Since Chris never completed his college education he mostly did blue collar jobs in construction all his life. On the other end, the author sites the example of Robert Oppenheimer who walked out of the allegation of poisoning his doctoral adviser with a mild probation because of his well off family background which fostered an all round personality development.

In the later parts of the book the author sites few examples of demographics and cultures which help explain interesting theories behind frequent plane crashes in a Korean airlines in late nineties and early two thousands, how Jews like Joseph Flom ruled the world of law and lawyers in 1970s and why Asians who are primarily rice cultivators are extremely good at math and science. Some of the facts about the demographic characterization like power distance, where the word of the elders in the family have a higher say in the family or the senior has an overpowering influence on the subordinates, are particularly interesting.

Malcom Galdwell is known for his other works like "The Tipping Point", "Blink : the power of thinking without thinking", "What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures" and "David and Goliath". People have expressed skepticism on some his work in which he attempts to reason behind the behaviors and events in real world. However, I found that in "Outliers", he talked about certain things in life which make sense and helps you to understand the reason behind the success and failures of people. It gave me a perspective that one doesn't need to be extremely intelligent to be successful but one also needs to be able to deal with the grayer shades of life and people along with willingness to succeed.  In all the book is a good read and gives plenty of perspective in life to ponder about.