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Gladwell's 'Outliers' succeed on the luck of the draw

Key to success isn't just good old American ingenuity, author argues

By A.H. Goldstein, Special to the Rocky

Published November 20, 2008 at 3:20 p.m.

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It's a philosophy embedded in the Western mind-set, a theory essential to the American dream.

Popular culture and history books have long stressed the importance of individual initiative and inherent skill in achieving success. Indeed, conventional wisdom holds that anyone with talent, determination and pure grit can make the leap from poverty to prosperity, like a character in one of Horatio Alger's dime novels.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, though, such a simplistic explanation of achievement is misleading at best and oversimplified at worst.

In his latest book, the best-selling author of Blink and The Tipping Point seeks to pinpoint the deeper roots of success and fame by tracing the specific circumstances behind the rise of well-known entrepreneurs, artists and lawyers. Detailing the meteoric careers of everyone from scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to the Beatles, Gladwell attributes achievement to conditions that go beyond mere talent and discipline.

His formula for success draws on a person's upbringing, heritage and temperament, as well as the influence of culture and historical circumstances. Perhaps most confounding to the ideal of individual initiative, Gladwell adds that a good amount of dumb luck has played a key part in many well-known success stories.

It's a compelling argument, one the author backs up with a detailed menu of biographies, as well as exhaustive research into sociology and psychology.

Gladwell draws these conclusions in part from his examinations of luminaries such as Bill Gates. A simplified version of the Microsoft founder's biography could well serve as an illustration of the power of individual skill and determination, he notes. That version usually explains that Gates, a gifted programmer who dropped out of Harvard, became one of history's richest individuals through sheer grit and smarts.

But according to Gladwell, Gates' success goes deeper than his own talent.

The son of a rich Seattle lawyer, Gates attended a well-to-do private school starting in seventh grade. In 1968, the mothers of several students founded a computer club, using a start-up fund of $1,000 to acquire an ASR-33 Teletype.

The early access to that first computer was followed by other extraordinary opportunities for Gates before he graduated high school: the chance to do programming work for a budding corporation, admission to the University of Washington's computer lab, an independent study project that saw him working on a computer system for a huge power company.

Gladwell also points out that Gates, who was born in 1955, had an optimal birthday for his eventual career path. Many pinpoint January 1975 as the symbolic dawn of the computer age - indeed, it was the month of the Popular Electronics magazine cover touting the arrival of the personal computer revolution. Like Steve Jobs and Bill Joy, both born within two years of Gates, he grew up at the perfect time to dive into a new and growing technology: He was young enough to have access to a budding technology,while avoiding the competition of the masses who would soon arrive, wanting to make their fortune in a new industry.

The fact that Gates had access to a nascent technology so early in life, at a time when computers were considered a luxury at most college campuses, was crucial, Gladwell maintains.

"And what did virtually all of those opportunities have in common?" Gladwell asks. "They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice. By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. . . . How many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience Gates had?"

If, like Gates, many successful people took advantage of opportunities, others benefitted just as much from their cultural background. In tracking things like the success of Jewish lawyers in corporate takeovers during the 1970s and examining the stereotype that Asians are more skilled at math, Gladwell admits that broad cultural generalizations make many uncomfortable. But he doesn't blanche.

"Why are we so squeamish?" Gladwell asks. "Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? "

He goes on to explain, for example, that the number system in Chinese is much more straightforward and easier to manipulate than its clunky English equivalent, a factor that may explain an inherent edge in mathematics. As for those Jewish lawyers, Gladwell posits that they learned their industry and innovation from their immigrant forebears - a generation of tailors that forged a thriving industry in a new world.

All told, Gladwell's vision of achievement is simultaneously heartening and cynical; accomplishment does not depend on specific genes, but it does rely, to a large part on a cosmic lottery, on the type of dumb luck that offers no explanation or justification.

With an approachable writing style and detailed data, Gladwell invests his theory with urgency. After all, if so many of history's luminaries benefited from specific advantages and opportunities, how many potential Einsteins and Gates have fallen by the wayside because of plain rotten luck?

"We look at Bill Gates and say, in a spirit of self-congratulation, 'Our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur,'" Gladwell writes. "But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?"

A.H. Goldstein is a freelance writer in Denver.

Outliers: The Story of Success

* By Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown and Company, 284 pages, $27.99.

* Grade: A

Why the title?

Outlier, writes Gladwell, is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. Thus, his title refers to "men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary."

Comments

  • November 21, 2008

    6:33 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    JohnSWren writes:

    Each week we hear Outliers tell their stories at the Denver IDEA Cafe. Join us this afternoon or any Friday from 2 to 3:30 p.m. We meet at Panera Bread, 13th & Grant near the Capitol here in Denver.

    This afternoon we'll use this book review as a starting place for a brainstorming topic: "In what ways can people like you and me become an Outlier."

    Hope you'll join us this afternoon. RSVP yes, no or maybe and we'll email you a meeting notice each week. More info and RSVP at http://ideacafe.meetup.com/1

  • November 21, 2008

    5:43 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    JohnSWren writes:

    We brainstormed "In what ways can we become Outliers." at the Denver IDEA Cafe this afternoon. We had lots of ideas:

    Attend the IDEA Cafe
    Become part of a mastermind type group
    Become a risk taker
    Do the things you don't want to do.
    Do the things you WANT to do.
    Go from being a professional to being an expert.
    Visualize.
    Hire out and work smart.
    Think out of the box, break the conventions.
    Become friends with new people.
    Become friends with Outliers.
    Network.
    Go to national meetings.
    Find scholarships to go to meetings if you don't have the money.
    Overcome fear.
    Use affirmations.
    Go to meetings that motivate.
    Go to church services.
    Read books.
    Read the bible.
    Just do it.
    Replace fear with faith.
    Monitor thoughts, replace negative thoughts with positive.
    Use body language.
    Find a good mentor.
    Take a class.
    Join a club.
    Start a club.
    Be confident.
    Be around confident people.
    Have friends who lift you up.

    We did this as just a short warmup for brainstorming the other topics people have brought.

    Anyone who thinks it's impossible to become an Outlier should see The Miricle Worker. See http://denverwhenwhere.com for more.

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