Media Spotlight: Outliers: The Story of Success

18 July 2011 | By Samuel Dale

Are you sick of listening to the rags to riches tales of athletes, businessmen or rock stars? If so, read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which focusses on how the most successful people achieve what they do.

It is not, he claims, purely through hard work, talent and perseverance, as many would have you believe.

Gladwell makes a convincing case that luck, circumstance and opportunity play much bigger roles in success than is often acknowledged.

For example, the book proposes that a disproportionately large number of successful Canadian hockey players are born in the early months of the year. The reason is that the cut-off date for hockey trials is January 1. Someone born in late December could be almost a year younger than someone born in early January but playing in the same team.

He cites as an example the star Canadian hockey player Scott Wasden, who was born on January 4, just three days away from being the ideal age.

The month of one’s birth may be a matter of luck, but Gladwell also proposes the 10,000-hour rule, for which a successful person needs opportunity.

This rule applies to world-class chess players, who almost invariably take 10 years to rise to the top of their game. It takes a decade to reach the peak of their achievement because this represents 10,000 hours of practice.

If a person has the opportunity to put this amount of practice into their chosen field then success is far more likely.

Gladwell highlights the role of circumstance in life in a fascinating chapter suggesting an ethnic theory of plane crashes.

He points out that most airline disasters happen because of seven consecutive human errors. This chain of events is far more probable when the most experienced pilot is not flying. Gladwell explains that the senior pilot is more likely to question mistakes made by junior colleagues in the driving seat.

He draws on the example of a plane crash where the junior pilot was contacting air traffic control to explain that the plane was dangerously low on fuel. Driven by a perverse sense of embarrassment and false calm, the following conversation took place.

“Tell them we are in an emergency,” the senior pilot urges.

But the junior pilot merely explains the situation to air traffic control.

“That’s right to one eight zero on the heading and, ah, we’ll try once again,” he says. “We’re running out of fuel.”

Because he put the emergency in the second half of the sentence, air traffic control dismissed the seriousness of the situation with disastrous consequences.
The upshot is that crashes are more common in cultures where the language and culture struggle to convey emergency and dislike confrontation.

As Koreans display these attributes, Gladwell claims it has suffered a disproportionate number of crashes compared with other countries.

Through a series of interesting examples Gladwell shows that seemingly random coincidences and statistical anomalies are rarely what they seem.

Whether it is the birth date of a hockey player or the nationality of a pilot, these are not random after all.

Outliers is full of interesting facts and makes you consider success and achievement in a different light from the traditional attributions of innate talent and dogged hard work.

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