Our culture is enamored with high achievers. Of recent notoriety on social media is the morning routines of billionaires. Maybe there is something about what Wareen Buffet eats and what time he gets up at that we can glean that will help make us as successful as he is? We laud successful athletes, musicians and those that have reached the highest heights in business and politics. The myth that is built around these successful outcomes is that some of us are just endowed with drive and natural talent that enables some to rise to the top, but is this really true?

Time after time, in his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell breaks down these stereotypes through an eclectic variety of examples. The book opens with examples of youth hockey in Canada in which researchers found a curious observation: many of the top high school, college and pro hockey players in Canada seem to often have birthdays that cluster around the beginning of the calendar year. What the author shows is that there are very particular reasons as to why this may be.

The first is that for children, 6 to 9 months of development makes a big difference in size, athletic ability and skill. It just so happens that the cutoff date for grade enrollment in Canada is in January, so if one child was born January 2, he is put in the same class as a child born in September of the same year. Yet when these same children reach the age where organized sports are played, they are judged equally. The result is that those children lucky enough to be born close to but over the cutoff date are usually a bit more athletic and get picked for the hockey team. This gives them a chance to practice more and excel, honing their technique. At the same time, a child who may have needed a bit more physical development may be left behind and may eventually take a totally different course.

Gladwell goes on to show throughout the book that this is not an isolated case for hockey players in Canada. It is a theme that runs through every facet of our society. His overarching point is to demonstrate that luck and historical happenstance have almost just as much, if not everything to do with success as does talent and hard work.

Examples in Business

Gladwell then moves on to other areas to show how else his theory plays out. He shows examples of how many of the 19th century billionaires in the US were born in and around a close cluster of years. He then moves on to show that many of the current tech billionaires were born around the same time as well.

This observation in itself doesn’t say much but what stands out in this book is the historical and individual context that Gladwell provides which entertain as well as inform.

He hones in on the example of Bill Gates and Paul Allen. As children they took an interest in programming and were lucky enough to be in a middle class household that encouraged that learning. A young Gates had access to a computer club, which was very rare for a high school in the mid to late 1960’s. Eventually the club and involved parents petitioned to provide access to a computer at nearby University of Washington, which luckily also let the two stay late and program as long as they like. With these lucky break opportunities combined with curiosity and work, Allen and Gates at that particular point in time became probably some of the youngest experts in programming languages at the time. The combination of their esoteric knowledge as well as their youth and access to opportunities through family, enabled them to be able to start a software company at a young age and see themselves into immense wealth through the personal computer age. Gladwell time and time again, stresses that if one thing in their journey had gone wrong, we may have never heard of Paul Allen and Bill Gates.

The Role of Culture

The second part of the book goes into culture and rather than looking at success stories, takes a different turn to look at airline disasters and how communication affected them.

Gladwell delves into the history of crashes for Korean Air in the 1990’s which threatened the survival of the airline. Consultants and researchers were brought in to try and understand what was happening during flights so that this particular airline kept having so many crashes.

The conclusion and the solution was neither politically correct nor easy to solve: it was a culture issue. It wasn’t that Koreans were bad pilots or engineers, they were as qualified as a anyone else in the world. The difference was the way they communicated to each other in the cockpit, which followed many social norms found in East Asia. The Korean proclivity for a deference to authority was fine on the ground but in a cockpit it could lead to mistakes which turned deadly.

Korean Air was able to train their pilots to deal with air traffic control culture as well as speak up more forcefully if subordinates thought something was wrong. The airline proceeded to be re-accepted into the international flying community and today maintains an extremely good safety record.

Gldwell’s skill in the book and in his writing is to weave all of these seemingly unrelated stories together to tie back to his central theme, which is that circumstance plays heavily in success. In the second half of the book however, the Korean pilot stories introduce the reader to the importance of culture and cultural norms in how some groups of people seemingly achieve more in particular areas.

Some of the most logical yet illuminating stories were those of rice farmers and the amount of time, diligence and patience it took to make rice in the Pearl River Delta in Southern China. This type of work requires little land yet constant attention. Most rice farmers were left to their devices by landlords due to the small plots and high amount of work involved. This gave farmers an incentive to work harder to see the rewards. Over time, the notion of long hard work and reward is intertwined in the local culture. The implication of this, the author suspects, is that this culture then helps normalize long hours and hard work which has helped many Asian countries excel in the modern industrialized economy.

The author then contrasts this with the agricultural cultures of Europe and other locations which are dominated by wheat farming where large amounts of land are needed and fortune is often left to the whims of nature.

Reactions and Thoughts

Initially when this book was published in 2008, the conclusions were misconstrued by much of the public. Rather than taking away the points that extra attention towards academics and encouraging curiosity could help children excel later in life, a number of parents started to purposefully hold their kids back in school so that they may have a leg up in sports or other areas.

Yet this narrow view of the observations misses the point the author was trying to make: these success stories are great but how much more could we have collectively achieved if more people had access to opportunities like these? How many more Microsoft’s could there be if more people all over the world had just a little more access to opportunities like the ones Bill Gates had?

Rather than thinking of how myself or others could get a leg up, the impression I took away from the book was one of great optimism. I don’t know if myself or others are going to have great success in life but it’s reassuring to know that each of us has a chance and that many things in life that we hold in such high regard are due to luck as well as ability. I found encouraging the notion that if you keep at something, eventually circumstances may change and things may start to roll in your favor even if they have been going wrong for some time.

I think this is something many financial influencers can agree with given the events of the past 2 years. Many influencers were doing ok before the pandemic hit but the run up in the stock market and crypto produced an explosion of interest in financial topics and general knowledge. Those that were already dedicated to this space were able to take advantage.

I found many of the stories in the book inspiring and deeply satisfying which contributed to the optimism I took away. The stories of Jewish lawyers shut out of white shoe law firms in the first half of the 20th century, only to be rewarded as the market shifted in the 70’s and 80’s gives one hope that people can become wildly successful even when the odds at a particular place and time seem completely stacked against them.

I found this book to be a great read and relating it to my own life and people that I know as well. The evidence presented is not just anecdotal but backed up by studies and statistics which the author shares. Anyone interested in peering deeper into success or frustrated with their own lot may want to take a look at Outliers.

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