Outliers

I was drawn to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success because it had been cited many times by other authors and in particular for the idea that ten thousand hours of practice is necessary to develop mastery in a skill.

This was interesting to me as a budding author. How far along the writing path am I? A conservative, back of the envelope calculation, looking back at my life from age about ten years, shows that I have over seven thousand hours both reading and writing, two skills relevant to the writing process. That time is weighted more in favour of reading than writing.

There is some debate outstanding about whether his interpretation of the scientific evidence amounts to a usable rule. Ten thousand hours is more like an average amount of time rather than a hard and fast requirement. Many of the subjects in the research cited – which focused on violinists and was conducted by Anders Ericsson – indicates that many violinists achieved a highly proficient state with far fewer hours than Gladwell’s target.

A second argument against this rule of thumb is that focused practice, where an individual attempts exercises to develop specific skills, is necessary to make progress. Often this should be done with guidance and feedback from an expert. Gladwell cites the Beatles, who played for ten hour sessions every day of the week in Berlin, as providing the bulk of the time required for mastery. No doubt they got feedback from the audience, but it may be debatable whether it was feedback that would enhance their musical skills directly.

Opportunity

As interesting as his argument for the amount of practice required is, I found this less interesting than the other concepts in the book. The role of timing in various success stories, the outliers of the book’s title, is far more revealing. Gladwell opens the book with the idea that the month of birth is correlated with probability of a Canadian child becoming a professional hockey player.

Year of birth is also a key factor. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and several others profiled in the book are all born within a short number of months of each other. Gladwell argues that these individuals were all at the perfect age, their early twenties, when the computing revolution took over. Similarly all had had enough exposure – through the good fortune of a wealthy family or serendipitous accidents - to computers to be able to apply their skills and create companies that have dominated for the past few decades.

Each of these multi-millionaires were lucky to have been able to practice the new programming skills for years before the explosion of personal computing. Whether they each had ten thousand hours is perhaps debatable, as is whether that was a prerequisite for their success. I find it more compelling that they were perfectly placed to take advantage of the situation through a combination of opportunity and timing.

Can we learn from that? As a parent, how can I expose my children to the right experiences, in sufficient quantity, that they will be able to take advantage when the opportunity arises? Probably as impossible as being able to predict what the next big thing is going to be.

Culture

Another of the interesting topics the book covers is the impact of culture or shared heritage on how different races are perceived. He suggests that Asian children – who regularly outscore Western children in standardised math tests – may have developed this advantage through a number of cultural differences.

The first potential reason is a less complicated language to represent numbers than most western languages use. This allows them to learn to count earlier than counterparts who use English or other languages. In turn it may allow Asian children to learn to do addition, multiplication and other computations without needing to resort to as much rote learning, and to master it earlier.

Gladwell suggests that another potential cause is the tradition of the highly skilled labour required for farming in rice producing areas compared to crops and livestock habits elsewhere in the world. Rice farming requires attention at all times of year including during the dry season. For other crops, much of the year is simply spent waiting, interspersed with periods of high activity for planting or harvesting. Rice growing work is absorbing and yields have as much to do with the effort put in as to the weather that year.

The link between effort and reward in rice growing is clear and may have contributed to a culture where hard work is seen as the best way to prosper. Could this translate to Asians being better math students at all levels of learning? It is an interesting question and prompts me to consider the aspects of my own culture to see if there are advantages that I can use.

Plane Crashes

One of the longest chapters in the book covers the topic of plane crashes, in particular looking at the social dynamics in the cockpit that are often the product of specific ethnic traits. The conversations between the crew just before catastrophic accidents, recovered from the black box recordings, are presented and discussed, and if you are in any way afraid of flying, it might be a good idea to steer clear of this chapter.

Korean Airlines had a terrible record for flight safety, with the deference that junior crew members show to the captain often a part of the issue. The captain, as the senior officer, has to be able to interpret their observations, often masked warnings passively given and presented in overly polite language, but if through tiredness or distraction, he fails to understand the meaning, then disaster can happen.

The airline has since turned the record around and is today recognised for its flight safety. They did this, in part, by addressing the cultural deference that is necessary for junior officers when speaking with superiors. But should we consider the cultural nuances of nationality when choosing what airline to fly with?

Conclusion

This is an entertaining read and covers a lot of questions you might not ordinarily ask. The ten thousand hour “rule” is what got my attention, but it is certainly not the only interesting topic in the book.

The writing is accessible to all and the final chapter, in which the author describes the opportunities his grandmother had to escape poverty, is a nice way to conclude the book. Yes, external events and fortuitous timing may be necessary to create the circumstances for becoming an outlier, but it still requires action on the person or the society’s part to take advantage of circumstances.