Summary and Analysis of Outliers: The Story of Success: Based on the Book by Malcolm Gladwell
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Summary and Analysis of Outliers: The Story of Success: Based on the Book by Malcolm Gladwell
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Overview
Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
This short summary and analysis of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell includes:
- Historical context
- Chapter-by-chapter summaries
- Profiles of the main characters
- Important quotes
- Fascinating trivia
- Glossary of terms
- Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
About Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
What makes high achievers, like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and members of the Beatles so successful? Is it pure talent? Personal drive? An off-the-charts IQ?
In Outliers, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell explores the subject of success and argues that there is more to the story than individual exceptionalism. In addition to inherent talent or intelligence, there are other factors that have come into play for the innovators, artists, athletes, and prodigies who have become household names.
Many who have attained rock-star status in their fields may have education, culture, access to a specific technology or opportunity, and ten thousand hours of practice to thank for their reaching their goals.
Through a wide range of examples and anecdotes, learn what makes outliers so extraordinary.
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504043144 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Worth Books |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
| Series: | Smart Summaries |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 36 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Summary and Analysis of Outliers
The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4314-4
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Introduction: The Roseto Mystery
The insular town of Roseto, Pennsylvania, populated by descendants of Italian immigrants from Roseto Valfortore, Italy, is a curious medical anomaly: As early as the 1950s, the rate of heart disease and other ailments there was shockingly lower than the rest of the United States. Societal ills such as substance abuse and crime were also strikingly scarce. So what set Roseto apart? As physician Stewart Wolf discovered, the obvious potential causes — a healthy lifestyle, diet, genetics, and so forth — didn't seem to be in play. Instead, he concluded that the distinctive sense of community in the self-contained town — for instance, neighbors greeting one another, multiple generations of a family sharing a home, an overall "egalitarian ethos" — had a positive effect on the population's health and quality of life. Gladwell frames this surprising, paradigm-shifting lesson about health as an analogy for the argument Outliers will make about success.
Need to Know
Health may not be entirely about an individual's constitution or life choices — it has a lot to do with the cultural context in which a person lives. And that same principle may apply to personal success.
Chapter One: The Matthew Effect
We're accustomed to thinking of success as the result of some special, almost magical talent that allows individuals to shine and overcome any obstacles in their path, no matter what advantages they have or haven't been given. (Think of the classic "pulled himself up by his bootstraps" narrative.) But Gladwell is making the case that we are affected by the circumstances we're born into and the happy (or unhappy) situations we encounter in our lives.
To wit: An astounding number of Canada's elite junior hockey players were born in January, followed by February and March. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that the age cutoff for youth hockey is January 1 — so boys born in January could be playing with kids almost a year younger, which almost guarantees that the older players will stand out as having better ability. As coaches winnow down their teams to their perceived "all-stars," these older boys are more likely to be selected for the elite squads ... and hence to receive an advanced level of training and increased practice opportunities that help them develop their abilities and — literally — skate to success. (This phenomenon is also observed in other age-eligibility-limited sports, such as soccer.)
Need to Know
The "Matthew effect" — so called for the Biblical verse Matthew 25:29, which says that those with advantages will be given more, while those without will have theirs taken away — is a kind of snowball effect. An arbitrary advantage (such as one's date of birth relative to competitors) may well be rewarded with further opportunities, which reinforce the perception of superior ability and lead to ever more opportunities ... and so the achievement gap just keeps widening.
Chapter Two: The 10,000-Hour Rule
What does it take to turn talent and drive into success? We might think the answer lies in some ineffable quality or stroke of fate. Turns out, it can be quantified: by at least 10,000 hours spent practicing and honing one's gifts. And often, getting the chance to log those 10,000 hours of focused effort hinges on being in the right place at the right time.
Some striking examples: Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and widely considered to be a groundbreaker in modern computing, had the good fortune to attend the University of Michigan, where a then practically one-of-a-kind computer center became his second home. Mozart is often cited as a prodigy for composing concertos starting at age 6 — but his work didn't reach masterpiece level until he was 21. By the time of their American "Invasion," the Beatles had honed their talents performing hundreds of marathon gigs in Hamburg, Germany, sometimes clocking eight hours at a stretch.
And finally, one of the ultimate outliers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, had the stunning good luck to start seventh grade at a private school with a computer club funded by students' parents — a resource that the vast majority of college students didn't have at the time. Gates was one of a generation of tech pioneers born in or around 1955, a demographic sweet spot for nerds due to the transformational innovations in technology that were taking place as they came of age.
Need to Know
Malcolm Gladwell isn't denying that innate talent plays a part in success — who would argue that Mozart, the Beatles, or Bill Gates weren't gifted with anything more than practice time? But he does note that 10,000 hours is a fairly reliable benchmark for how long it takes a person to master their craft, if one is capable of and driven toward that level of mastery — and if that person has other factors (culture, technology, etc.) working in their favor.
Chapter Three: The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
Does a superior intellect always pan out into superior achievement? We'd like to think that true genius always shines through, like a diamond in the rough. But evidence suggests that transcendental brainpower can't necessarily overcome the obstacles one is born facing — and in a bigger picture of success, pure intelligence is just one piece of the puzzle.
Chris Langan, described by Gladwell as "the public face of genius in American life, a celebrity outlier," has an IQ that is "literally off the charts" — too high to be accurately measured by standard testing — but never achieved true "outlier" status. Gladwell argues, citing psychologist Liam Hudson, that there's a certain upper threshold beyond which additional IQ points don't count for much in terms of predicting achievement, such as the Nobel Prize. (Consider the analogy of basketball — height matters up to a point, but doesn't necessarily correlate with skill once you're looking at the difference between, say, six foot eight and six foot six.)
The "threshold effect" — the idea that past a certain point, additional IQ points don't mean much — suggests that other factors come into play in determining success potential. Gladwell cites an example of a "divergence test," which, as opposed to a "convergence test" such as the standard IQ test, has no correct answers to arrive at, instead inviting the taker to come up with responses. Pure analytical intelligence, as measured in IQ points, won't give you the creativity and imagination to open your mind to unconventional responses — what we might call thinking outside the box.
One story that illustrates this point: In the 1920s, Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychology professor, embarked on a longitudinal study of children identified as possessing extraordinarily high IQs, anticipating that they would go on to accomplish great things. But this cadre of Terman's "Termites," as they came to be known, did not grow up to achieve the kind of distinction one might expect from beyond-99th-percentile intellects. While some found moderate success, none became true luminaries. Gladwell contends that Terman was myopic in focusing purely on IQ as a predictor of achievement.
Need to Know
The idea that when it comes to IQ, the "cream of the crop" will always float to the top is a common misconception. While a certain level of intelligence may be a prerequisite for success, additional IQ points past that threshold may not make much of a difference. Other variables, such as imagination, are necessary to really make people shine.
Chapter Four: The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2
The life story of Chris Langan is indeed, as Gladwell says, "heartbreaking." Raised in a poor family with an abusive stepfather in Bozeman, Montana, he enrolled in Oregon's Reed College on a full scholarship, but lost it when his mother failed to fill out the renewal forms. After dropping out of Montana State University, he worked in construction, on a clam boat, and as a bouncer ... all while reading scholarly texts and penning a work he calls the "Cognitive Theoretical Model of the Universe." He now resides on a horse farm in Missouri, while continuing his own learning independently. Langan is an off-the-charts genius, but he never had any support, and he never caught a break, and he didn't possess the social savvy for sweet-talking — say, the dean at Reed — into giving him one.
By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, had genius, means, and "practical intelligence" — the sort of savvy that leads you intuitively to say the right thing to the right person at the right time, which Langan lacked. Granted, Langan's upbringing did not exactly lend itself to the development of social skills, while Oppenheimer was raised in an environment of support and encouragement — plus a privileged background complete with summer trips to Europe — that cultivated them. He landed the plum role of scientific director of the Manhattan Project at age 38 — despite the fact that in grad school, he had attempted to poison his tutor with lab chemicals. (Apparently, Oppenheimer was angry at the tutor for making him study a branch of physics he didn't enjoy.)
Upbringing may play a vital role in determining whether talent will lead to success. Sociologist Annette Lareau, who intensively studied third-graders from rich and poor households, shadowing their families throughout their daily routines, found that the well-to-do parents were deeply invested in their children's highly scheduled activities, and gave them a sense of "entitlement" — the impression that their opinions and preferences mattered, and that they should feel comfortable speaking up to get what they wanted. On the other hand, the parents of poor kids largely left them to their own devices, and the intimidation they often felt around authority figures was passed on to their children. This group of kids experienced "constriction" — the opposite of entitlement. They didn't have the confidence to assert themselves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Terman's findings about his "Termites" — whom he divided into A, B, and C groups based on their level of academic and professional achievement — aligned neatly along lines of "family background." Those who had graduated from college and found professional success (the 150 "As") came primarily from educated families who had encouraged them, while the 150 "Cs" who struggled even to make a living were, as Gladwell puts it, "from the other side of the tracks."
Need to Know
When it comes to career achievement, intellectual superiority may not be much of an advantage if it isn't accompanied by social skills and social privilege — and those social skills seem often to stem from that privilege.
Chapter Five: The Three Lessons of Joe Flom
Joe Flom was a Jewish lawyer who cut his teeth in the 1950s and '60s on the kind of litigation that the WASPy "white-shoe" law firms wouldn't touch back in the day, and eventually became a named partner in the renowned multibillion-dollar firm now known as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. As Gladwell tells it, being the child of poor immigrants from Eastern Europe would seem like a disadvantage when trying to break into the elitist and somewhat anti-Semitic world of law at that time — but Flom actually benefited from certain factors that helped make him an outlier.
First, the fact that the "old-line law firms" refused to get their hands dirty with legal actions like hostile takeovers — considered unseemly until the 1970s — allowed Flom and others like him to master that niche. And by the time such Wall Street maneuvers became big business in the '70s and '80s, they had built their reputations as the go-to guys for that kind of wheeling and dealing.
Secondly, Flom was born in a demographic sweet spot — 1930 — much like Bill Gates's generation of tech moguls. As the US birthrate had dipped due to the Great Depression, men of Flom's age faced less competition for college admissions and job openings. And thirdly, though his father and many other immigrants of his generation had toiled long hours for little profit in the garment industry, their example had established the value of hard but "meaningful" work in a skilled trade they had learned in the Old World. Through their grueling labor — combined with skill, ingenuity, and creativity — these tradesmen passed down to their children the idea that work with "autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward" is satisfying and meaningful. Strikingly, many of these immigrants had offspring who went on to become doctors or lawyers.
Need to Know
The dedicated and skilled labor of a wave of European immigrant trades-people, plus a fortuitous "demographic trough" of low birthrate, produced a generation of high achievers among their offspring. And their lesson, to their children and the rest of us, is that willingness to devote boundless time and energy to creative, challenging, and autonomous work leads to job satisfaction and the potential for great success.
Chapter Six: Harlan, Kentucky
We've all heard the notorious story of the Hatfield-McCoy family feud. But it turns out that there are plenty of other instances of warfare between rival clans in the Appalachians in the nineteenth century. One such conflict is that of the Howards and Turners in Harlan County, Kentucky. The families traded gunfire on repeated occasions, and the casualties mounted on both sides — the violence becoming so commonplace that Mrs. Turner scolded her dying son to stop moaning and groaning over his gunshot wounds: "Die like a man, like your brother did!"
These sorts of family feuds were common in Appalachia because of a particular convergence of factors: The area's residents were descendants of a Scotch-Irish "culture of honor" in which slights were to be avenged, not forgiven. And as in the highlands of their ancestral homelands, the prevailing livelihood was herding, not farming — a line of work that requires vigilance against animal thieves, and the ability to intimidate as a deterrent.
This honor culture persists in the South to this day, as evidenced by a modern University of Michigan study in which student subjects were provoked by being called "asshole." The Northerners didn't get too worked up about it, while the Southerners — a well-educated, affluent lot, mind you — displayed signs of anger, including increased testosterone and cortisol levels.
Need to Know
Long after the direct circumstances that shape cultural legacies cease to be in play, their effects continue to shape characteristics of a society. Evidence shows that traits passed on from long-gone ancestors exert a strong influence on their modern-day descendants.
Chapter Seven: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
If cultural heritage has such a profound influence on individuals, could it actually play a role in events such as plane crashes? Two examples — the Korean Air Flight 801 crash in 1997 in Guam and Avianca Flight 052 in New York in 1990 — suggest the answer is yes. In both cases, the crashes were not caused by mechanical error of the aircraft. Rather, an incremental series of human errors were compounded, black box recorder transcripts indicate, by poor communication. And those failures of communication were, in turn, caused by a culturally ingrained deference to authority.
In the Korean Air tragedy, the captain, fatigued from a long shift of flying, attempted to land, guided only by eyesight in stormy conditions. He made a fatal miscalculation that missed the runway by miles and sent the plane into the side of a hill. His first officer, accustomed to accepting the higher-ranking pilot's authority without question, made a tentative suggestion that weather radar might be useful, but didn't push it.
On the Avianca flight, the Colombian crew had been circling JFK so long, the plane was running out of fuel, but the first officer failed to forcefully convey that fact to the notoriously intimidating New York airport's Air Traffic Control. The plane ultimately crashed and burned in Long Island.
What's telling about these two incidents is that both Korean and Colombian cultures have what is called a high "power distance index" — a regard for rank and authority so deeply ingrained that the barrier for a subordinate to speak up to a superior is practically insurmountable. This is conducive to "mitigated speech," a form of indirect communication that requires the listener to read (or rather, hear) between the lines. While Western culture's communications have a "transmitter orientation" — placing the burden of getting the message across on the one conveying it — Korean culture is "receiver oriented," meaning it's on you to get the message.
Korean Air was able to recover from its poor safety record, Gladwell notes, by hiring a consultant from Delta Airlines who mandated that all pilots must speak English. By changing their communication patterns, crews were able to dispense with some of the cultural conventions that could inhibit them from collaborating effectively.
Need to Know
Plane crashes in the modern age tend to be "the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions," often brought about by poor weather conditions and pilot fatigue, rather than some catastrophic mechanical failure of the aircraft. And flight crews from relatively egalitarian cultures that have a low "power distance index" may be better equipped to avert these tragedies, since subordinates will more readily speak up to their superiors in a moment of crisis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2016 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Context,Overview,
Summary,
Cast of Characters,
Direct Quotes and Analysis,
Trivia,
What's That Word?,
Critical Response,
About Malcolm Gladwell,
For Your Information,
Bibliography,
Copyright,