Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers

[Hugh]

Subtitled The Story of Success. It tells the stories of successful people from a very different perspective. We've all heard about Bill Gates of course, but is it really true that he was just a hard working genius who worked his way to the top? There was more to it than that, and Gladwell gets into the overlooked details, including the culture he grew up in and how it was a huge factor in Gates' success.

He also goes into how culture can cause failure. He has a very long chapter on plane crashes. A factor that has been found in many of them was deference to authority is more prevalent in some cultures than others. Part of the remaking of Korean Air, after several crashes, was to teach the crew not to be so deferential to the captain if he's about to screw up. It was an American consultant, by the way, who helped remake Korean Air.

And then here's the part that really got me - he also wrote about the culture in Harlan, Kentucky, in the Appalachian mountains, (I grew up right next door in Bell County Kentucky). He talks about their cutlure of "honor" and the infamous family feuds in that area. He also mentioned an experiment done at a Michigan college that determined that the insult of calling someone an "asshole" really riled up southern men, more so than any other insult used. A few years back I asked a neighbor in my apartment building to turn his music down. He called me an asshole. I ripped his screen door off the hinges.

 

[Hugh]

Also noteworthy - comparing the "honor" culture in the mountains of Appalachia to the culture of hardworking Jewish immigrants arriving in New York a couple of generations ago shows why there may be such a huge gap between the success of Jewish New York lawyers and Kentucky sawmill workers. If you are one of those sensitive types that gets offended or uptight in conversations about race, you will want to avoid this book.

 

[SFG75]

Just finished the book myself this past week. He does make a convincing argument that success has a lot more to do with incidental and socail structural advantages, as opposed to the majority of success being due to herculean individual effort. He did a masterful job of drawing a line betwen individual and institutional support for Bill Gates and Bill Joy to succeed. I was interested to learn how it takes 10,000 hours to possibly master any task and how he calculated both men reached that point in their respective careers. Yes, the men were driven to work with technology but both gained access to computers when they wer very rare due to suportive parents and in Joy's case, the University of Michigan having the mother of all computer program labs in the early '70s.

The anger and "honor" ethic in the south was credited to highland settlers from Scotland and other areas where herding was the predominate occupation. These were great examples of how culture influences behavior. At the same time, there is free will and it can check impulse. I would agree that there are many factors that go into a person achieving success, but personal effort is still a big one to me. There are people who have boundless opportunity, but who choose to squander it. Gladwell doesn't explain how and why those people don't succeed. I would argue that he makes a good case for consideration of "other" factors, but fails to lay out how those factors trump individual effort in importance, and really, how could you quantify such a thing? A good read, definitely worth one's time.

 

[Hugh]

Just finished the book myself this past week. He does make a convincing argument that success has a lot more to do with incidental and socail structural advantages, as opposed to the majority of success being due to herculean individual effort. He did a masterful job of drawing a line betwen individual and institutional support for Bill Gates and Bill Joy to succeed. I was interested to learn how it takes 10,000 hours to possibly master any task and how he calculated both men reached that point in their respective careers. Yes, the men were driven to work with technology but both gained access to computers when they wer very rare due to suportive parents and in Joy's case, the University of Michigan having the mother of all computer program labs in the early '70s.

The anger and "honor" ethic in the south was credited to highland settlers from Scotland and other areas where herding was the predominate occupation. These were great examples of how culture influences behavior. At the same time, there is free will and it can check impulse. I would agree that there are many factors that go into a person achieving success, but personal effort is still a big one to me. There are people who have boundless opportunity, but who choose to squander it. Gladwell doesn't explain how and why those people don't succeed. I would argue that he makes a good case for consideration of "other" factors, but fails to lay out how those factors trump individual effort in importance, and really, how could you quantify such a thing? A good read, definitely worth one's time.

The internet really started taking off in 1995, which put me at 30 years old at the time it was happening. I was an employee at a company that was a distribution center for companies doing business on the internet, but that company failed due to mismanagement. So failing at that instance, right on the precipice of the internet boom, was not my fault.

However, I was also involved with another person in starting up companies on the internet at that same time, but when it was getting difficult to get the websites and businesses up and running, I just gave up. Being the right age at the right time, (even though I didn't have the 10,000 hours of experience), I still squandered what could have been a huge success. It should be me rather than Jeff Bezos selling Kindles right now. He may be laughing all the way to the bank, but I was the one buying pitchers of beer for all my friends every weekend and I'm sure many of them really appreciated it.

 

[SFG75]

There are a few things that stick out in my mind's eye regarding the internet and how much things have changed. In 1998, I did a 50 hour observation class. I worked at a tech center in a public library. I will never forget seeing an 8 year old help his father look up construction jobs using alta-vista search and printing out various leads. The middle aged father had no clue how in the world the computer worked and just hoped that his boy wouldn't press "the wrong button" or something. Tom Friedman is right, the world is now "flat" and technology is the flattener. I also remember when the first student computer terminal center was created and how students loved using list-servs to arrange rides to various home towns over thanksgiving break, jobs, and to buy or sell dorm items. That was truly something else, how far we've come.