Book Review: Outliers

Outliers is a book about people who are off the charts successful – what is the root cause for their success?

Frequently, it is attributed to talent, genius, or other inherent traits. There is evidence that the attribution of success to intrinsics is harmful. Gladwell goes one step further and makes the point that it is really not primarily the intellect that makes a genius successful, but the circumstances.

An example: most professional hockey players are born in January, February, or March. That’s odd, because there are not actually more births during that period. So what is causing this?

It turns out that this is connected to the cutoff date for training camps. Children who are born early in the year can be practically a year older than those who are born December 31 of the same calendar year. The differences in motor development and body size are huge. So children born early in the year get selected more frequently.

A natural objection is to say “hey, the other children will catch up, by the time they are 20 years old a few months will not make a difference, and the ones with the most talent will float to the top. Malcolm’s argument makes no sense.”

While that makes sense, the children selected early will have gotten a lot of practice in the interim. And no amount of talent can overcome the practice gap. In fact, Malcolm Gladwell cites literature and examples to demonstrate that, in order to archive true mastery in anything, an individual needs 10,000 hours of practice.

This is just one of many examples in the book, which is a very pleasant and quick read. The message is not as encouraging to parents as it could be, as most of the circumstances Mr Gladwell cites are well out of control of parents. But maybe it is an approximation of the truth. Read this book if you can.