To branch out of my comfort zone, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. A journalist who has written for the Washington Post and The New Yorker, Gladwell provides an analysis on how certain people and groups achieve success – whether financial, popular, or creative success. While the book is well written and engaging, it suffers from oversimplification and generalizations about psychological processes.
Outliers is split into two sections: opportunity and legacy. In the first half of the book, opportunity, Gladwell analyzes The Beatles, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer among others and argues that they had opportunities to hone their skills that most people do not have. For example, Gladwell mentions that The Beatles became a great band because that had the opportunity to fine tune their skills while performing in Hamburg, Germany for two years. Gladwell estimates that The Beatles performed in Hamburg an estimated twelve hundred times – satisfying the “10,000 Hour Rule,” which is the metric he identifies with attaining mastery over any skill (Gladwell 50).
The second half of the book is focused on legacy and how it influences whether people are successful or not. Gladwell talks about the honor code inherent in people living in Harlan, Kentucky, the reluctance of certain ethnic groups to call attention to risks while flying aircraft due to culture deference, and how the Chinese succeed in mathematics due to rice paddy cultivation among other case studies. This part of the book is the weakest section because Gladwell relies on oversimplification and generalizations to make his points. In one instance, in the section on cultivating rice paddies, Gladwell compares Eastern and Western agricultural practices and concludes that since Western agriculture relies on mechanical equipment, “the people who grow rice have always worked harder than most any other kind of farmer” (232-233). Aside from the fact that it is nearly impossible to measure how hard someone works, this is a weak argument because the correlation between rice paddy cultivation and success in mathematics is not convincingly established. Furthermore, rice cultivation is not unique to Eastern agriculture as rice is grown around the world. This is truly an example of correlation not equaling causation.
That said, Outliers has value as a readable introduction to basic psychology and it provides an interesting perspective on what makes people successful. Also, Gladwell is a talented writer who can paint a clear picture with a light journalistic style. It is unfortunate that most of his arguments are surface level that do not engage with data and other evidence to prove his points.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Back Bay Books, 2011.
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