Outliers are those people that rise to the top — the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Henry Fords, JP Morgans, Carnegies, etc. The people that make names for themselves through their accomplishments.

Until reading this, I have had the notion that opportunity was created through hard work, and success was largely the result of applying oneself, with perhaps a little bit of luck mixed in. The implication of my mistaken view, of course, is that people that are not successful are lazy — which isn’t very fair, since many of the people that do not share the success of Bill Gates are very hard workers.

Gladwell, who was the guest speaker at our Scholarship Luncheon last year (my book is a gift from the Alumni Association, thanks guys!), sums up his ideas rather succinctly in the penultimate chapter:

“It is not the brightest who succeed. … Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

Each chapter of the book explores one (mistaken) explanation for why these people achieve hyper-success. “They’re geniuses,” or “They’re innately talented,” or “They were born into it.” Each of these people did work very hard, and they were intelligent, and they did have luck — but it’s much more than that.

Gladwell tears down our preconceptions about success being completely stochastic or completely deterministic — and builds up this idea of an outlier that gets a lucky break and runs it into next Tuesday. Not since Leavitt’s Freakonomics have I been shown such a revolutionary way of looking at commonplace observations.

The first half of the book discusses those lucky breaks people get, whether it’s an opportunity literally given to them by someone else, or something innate.

For example — the day, or sometimes the year, can have a tremendous effect on your potential for success.

If an annual opportunity for youths has a cutoff date, then being born immediately AFTER that cutoff date can be greatly beneficial, since you will be significantly more developed than the other people applying for that opportunity the following year (when you’re dealing with growth-spurting teenagers, the difference a month or two can make can be quite significant).

In other cases, simply being born at the right time of the century is what’s needed. Many of the tech giants that rocketed to success in the Internet era were born in or near 1955. Don’t believe me?

• Bill Gates (Microsoft): October 28, 1955
• Paul Allen (Microsoft): January 21, 1953
• Steve Ballmer (Microsoft): March 24, 1956
• Steve Jobs (Apple): February 24, 1955
• Eric Schmidt (Google): April 27, 1955
• Bill Joy (coded most of the programs that run the Internet…seriously): November 8, 1954
• Scott McNealy (co-founded Sun Microsystems): November 13, 1954
• Vinod Khosla (co-founded Sun Microsystems): January 28, 1955
• Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founded Sun Microsystems): September 30, 1955

People born in 1955 were just old enough to really get into the Personal Computer industry when it became feasible, but young enough that they hadn’t established themselves elsewhere with the old mainframe-based paradigm.

For me, of course, this begged the question: What kind of profession or advantage does my birthday / birth year predispose me for?

Another key point of these, and many others, is the so-called “10,000 hour rule.” Gladwell cites people that are experts in their craft — time and time again, they really hone their skill to a fine point after about 10,000 hours. (For the non-math oriented, 10,000 hours is roughly 3-4 hours per day, every day, for about 10 years…if you do ANYTHING with that kind of devotion, you will become an expert at it). It’s not that these people were innately gifted — they were just smart enough — but they put in the time to learn a subject so intimately they mastered it.

For some, such as in the case of The Beatles, or Bill Gates, this meant getting a fortuitous opportunity to start putting in those hours of practice, and then capitalizing on it. (In the former, it was playing long 5-8 hour shows in London day after day, in the latter, it was being allowed access to program on a computer at a very young age, when such a thing was normally very expensive and rare.)

And being a genius? Not as important as one would think. Being smart enough is what is important. Studies into intelligence and aptitude have shown that rather than being a functional relationship, intelligence is merely an issue of thresholds — are you smart enough to get your diploma? Smart enough to get your graduate or post graduate degree? Smart enough to make that opportunity work for you? Most of us, by definition, are not MENSA members, but there is a large number of us that are more than capable of accomplishing hypersuccess, if intelligence alone were the only factor that mattered (and as Gladwell shows in spades: it isn’t.)

It wasn’t just the hard work, nor was it just the lucky break, nor was it just the tenacity, intelligence, or interest — it’s the gestalt interplay of all of these elements.

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When I first heard about this book, it was an interview with Gladwell on NPR; Fresh Air with Teri Gross, I believe. I caught the latter half, where he was talking about why southeast Asians are so good at math. (Spare me the gripes about stereotyping & prejudice – countless studies have consistently shown that natively-born or first-descendant southeast Asians have a much higher mathematical aptitude)

The reason? Rice paddies. (partly, anyways — their system of counting and numerical nomenclature are slightly more intuitive than ours, so children can pick up basic mathematical concepts much earlier)

Rice Paddies, and the villages & societies built around them, are curious anomalies. Rice requires such absolute precision to grow correctly, and such a vast amount of time and effort (~60 hrs / wk, and tasks as tedious as individually brushing the bugs off of the Rice plants), that it requires a very serious dedication to the art. But the end result is that there is a direct correlation between effort and yield: hard work and determination can be converted directly into more rice.

The discipline of math shares similar traits. People who are skilled at math are not innately gifted at it, they just keep plugging away at the concepts and practice until they understand it; Like rice, there is a direct correlation between effort and understanding.

Read this book. I won’t say that it will change your life — it’s not a self-help book, really, but it will at least change your perception about how people find success and what it means to be successful. For me, it made the idea of being successful a little more accessible, and really got my mind churning about ways that I can differentiate myself more — put more hours in, play to my strengths, and always, always, be on the lookout for opportunities to open.

Gladwell’s two previous books “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” will be on my to-read list for next year.

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