Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers

I enjoyed Malcom Gladwell’s Blink when I read it about a year ago, so I approached his recent book Outliers with much expectation. I wasn’t disappointed. Like Blink this book has a concisely statable thesis: there are factors that influence success which have greater impact than talent, work ethic or character. Possible factors are personality traits, latent biases in the system, or the propitiousness of time and place.

In some instances there is a lesson to be drawn. Gladwell describes the contrasting life trajectories of two geniuses, Chris Langan and Robert Oppenheimer. Chris Langan is the highest IQ American today. Despite effort and ambition, success seems to have eluded him. On the other hand, Oppenheimer, the physicist who headed up the Manhattan Project, went on to fame and glory (until things caught up with him in the McCarthy era). This was inspite of unseemly episodes – as when he was charged with plotting to poison his doctoral adviser! –, and controversies relating to his communist leanings. Gladwell argues that what swung it for Oppy was his extraordinary charm, something that separates him from Langan. Raw intelligence doesn’t cut it beyond a point.

However, more often than not there is no apparent lesson: success is influenced by factors that a person has no control over. We all know people for whom the key driver of success was being in the right place at the right time. One of Gladwell’s most interesting examples is a list of the richest people in history, with wealth normalized to the present time. Nearly 20% of this list comprises people born in the U.S. in the 1830s. The putative reason is that these people were at the right age, and the at right place, to benefit from the post-Civil War reconstruction, specifically the railroad boom. Of course they were immensely talented but that couldn't have been the sole, or even predominant, explanation for their success: as Gladwell notes, the distribution of talent couldn’t have been so generous to one specific decade in history.

It is when Gladwell strays beyond the confines of the thesis stated above that the unity of the material is compromised (I remember having a similar sense about Blink as well). In later parts of the book he discusses such topics as why Korean Air had a concentration of accidents during a certain period, or why Asian children who trace their roots to Southern China have done very well academically. The point he seeks to illustrate is the impact of cultural traits on work and success. His final chapter on the chance events that shaped the history of his own family also strains the coherence of the material.

But, those nits aside, most of the case studies in the book are interesting, memorable, and fun. Two thumbs up.