Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Audio Book: 7 hours Paperback Book: 336 pages
Malcolm Gladwell spells out all throughout this book that success, genius, financial gain, celebrity are not just luck of the draw. Glory and accolades do not favor one over the other. Things don’t merely happen without cause factors behind them. Most importantly, none of us are born under a bad moon and therefore haven’t lost out at life for any reason other than our lack of experience. In this book Malcolm Gladwell points out a strange anomaly that the best and most famous hockey players in the world tend to be born in the first 3 months of the year which seems to be off putting for want to be players born in the latter 9 months, but, upon closer inspection, we see that the kids born in the early part of the year, start school and training sooner than the other children born latter. So the first born of the year have access to earlier beginning of training, more time on the ice than the latter born and more guidance from Pros turned coaches. It actually has nothing to do with the dates what it has to do with is additional training. In truth, players born latter would need to increase their time on the ice extensively to catch up and the actual practice time is what accounts for winners as opposed to the kids with less coaching and less ice time. He talks about how some folks seem to be born at the right time under the right star to succeed and again at first glance millionaires, Andrew Carnegie, J Paul Getty, etc. were born around the same time but in their environment times were changing, the railroad became the popular means of transportation both people and freight and so anyone getting in on the ground floor at that time became phenomenally rich in a short amount of time – it had nothing to do with just when they were born but then too it had everything to do with when they were born because the way of life was changing with the environment so therefore being born at that time was fortuitous for investing in a soon to be burgeoning railroad business. It was what was occurring at the time they were born, but, it wasn’t just lucky to be born then. Opportunities were at hand and these men by virtue of their knowledge and business prowess were able to take advantage of them and prosper. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the rest of the Silicon Valley group were born in the 1950s. Again, it wasn’t just that they were born at lucky times of the year or in years pulsing with luck. Bill Gates lived a well-to-do existence as a young boy and young man and because of that he was afforded opportunities that not just any young man walking in off the street would have been given. Bill Gates was born during the time that computers were the size of entire rooms and worked off of punch cards. Bill proved to be so knowledgeable and spent so many hours on the system in place then that he was afforded the opportunity to unlimited access to working on a computer as many hours as he wanted by studying and gleaning the knowledge that proved him worthy of independent study and his love of computing and the endless hours he spent on it gave him a foot up on others who at a time when a computer could cost up to a million dollars and few, not even college professors had the type of unlimited hours granted them that Bill was approved for. He would go and go on the computer until he literally dropped from lack of sleep and food. So, when someone says, man, Bill Gates got lucky and look where he landed. Bill Gates paid his dues by gleaning knowledge from all the thousands of hours he spent on the computer he had access to learn all the ins and outs and develop new ideas on how to make possible better and faster ways to find new information and come up with alternate programming ideas. It was about being born in a lucky year or decade. It was about putting more effort into learning the skills that made him the billionaire he is today. He cites the Beatles as an example, too. They didn’t just luck into their celebrity. When they were playing weekends gigs for not much money they got an offer to go to Hamburg, Germany to play. They were young guys with lots of energy though they had no idea they would be expected to play 8 hours a day, 7 days a week! You don’t hear about that part of their Hamburg days, too often, but that is where they honed their craft. They arrived a little green, but they returned to England with a tight sound, great guitar riffs, spot on vocals, and a confident stage presence all of which they learned from all the time they spent performing on stage in Hamburg. Had Hamburg not happened to them, we may never have heard of the Beatles or the Quarrymen or the Silver Beatles or any other name they went by prior to stardom, Hamburg, while the rough years due to their workload also taught them what worked and what didn’t, gave them the time to work out their awesome sound, forced them to start writing their own material since with so many hows to perform they couldn’t keep playing the same cover tunes over and over. So again, it wasn’t being in the right place at the right time so much as it was yes, being in the right place to get the offer, but working their little guitar, keyboard and drum playing fingers to the marrow in order to win the skill to bring in the fans that led to the notoriety that led them to world fame. All these folks Gladwell calls Outliers – they were out there with lots of others but they all surpassed others in their fields because they had something special the rest didn’t – they had done their homework, focused on gaining what skills they needed and put in the time and effort to perfect their talents making it look easy when it certainly was not. They gave up a lot to gain the knowledge they needed but it paid off substantially for all of them in the end. Not luck – love enough for what they were doing to pursue whatever it took to be the best. Good book. It will really illuminate a lot of things we take for granted. Well done, Malcolm Gladwell!- Shirley J
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