Brynn Marie Evans

I decided to pick up this book, Outliers, when I was waiting for my flight to SFO this past weekend, and before I returned home, I had finished it! It was an interesting and easy read (largely due to its interestingness).

I most appreciated how the ideas in Outliers echo the theory of distributed cognition, but for human intelligence and success. Gladwell’s point in this book is to dispel traditional notions of what it means to be successful (from luck or pure genius alone) and look at the full context and history of successful people. In other words, we are (fully) products of our environments and of history. It is a “lie,” he says, to attribute someone’s success to anything without understanding where they came from, the culture they were raised in, the opportunities they had, and the subsequent ambition and personalities they developed. This may sound familiar to students of Ed Hutchins, who reminds us that cognition is not only what occurs within the “skin and skull” of a single individual—it is a product of our interactions with the social, material, and cultural artifacts of our environments (Cognition in the Wild).

Gladwell does a good job of outlining the various contributing factors to the success of Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, hockey players, jewish lawyers, and others, while also highlighting the failures of mere intellect (Chris Langan). For example, success is partly due to:

• hard work: it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in some domain.
• cultural legacies: hard working attitudes come from observing and experiencing the autonomy and direct payoff of work in places like rice paddys and garment factories; the grammar and regularity of Asian number systems gives a built-in advantage to learning the fundamentals of 21st century mathematics.
• social inheritance: the ”culture of honor” among the descendants of the Scotch-Irish herdsmen who came to populate the American South lead to (family) feuds; language “mitigation” between airline pilots from high “Power Distance” cultures, like South Korea, causes crucial miscommunication and, at times, plane crashes.

BUT ALSO to:

• the fortune of the times: the 1830s was the perfect time to be born if you were a budding entrepreneur (John D. Rockefeller; Andrew Carnegie; Jay Gould); 1955 was the perfect time to be born if you were a budding computer programmer (Bill Gates; Bill Joy; Eric Schmidt; Steve Jobs); the demographic trough of the 1930s gave an educational advantage to children born between the World Wars, and helped them avoid the economic devastation of the Great Depression.
• historical traditions/laws: being born close to the enrollment cutoff date for hockey (Jan 1), baseball (Jul 31), and school (varies, end of calendar year) grants a huge advantage to those students even a few months more mature; Jamaica implemented a new education policy the year before Gladwell’s mother began high school, without which she could not have afforded school.

By the end of the book, we realize that any individual instance of success  — you could argue even winning the lottery — is due to a convergence of many factors, from the way our personalities guide us to respond in different environments to the unexpected circumstances we find ourselves in. Of course! This seems so obvious! We don’t think of ourselves as an instance in time — we continue to evolve and adapt in response to social, technological, and environmental forces. Why, then, should a single event that’s part of our history be evaluated (or critiqued) as an instance in time? It should not, but it often is. And it is this misconception (and mis-framing of some of the world’s problems) that Gladwell hopes people will latch onto so we can begin a retraining, in much the way Korean Air and KIPP schools have done, to improve everything from education to government.

…

In reflecting on these ideas, I considered the success that my own father has had in his life and career. (And it helped that I had a conversation with him about it just after I finished Outliers.) I won’t tell his whole story here, but there are two things I will mention that relate to Gladwell’s list of contributing factors.

First, my father grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, where his family ultimately settled after arriving from Eastern Europe. He lived with his parents (American-born) and his grandparents (European-born), and I believe a huge part of his success came from being around his grandfather, Andrew. Andrew was not quite the garment factory worker that Gladwell describes, but he came to this country with nothing, educated himself, and went on to run several businesses (banking, insurance, and a bakery). His work was autonomous and directed; he was incredibly hard-working; and like Gladwell suggests of descendants of these European immigrants, my father absolutely inherited this work ethic.

A second struck of “fortune” (which we now know is never the case) came in 1983 after my father earned his PhD. He tells me that this was the worst time to be job hunting in two decades, and as a result, there were 3 professor positions available (across the country!), which every graduating PhD was applying for. How my father came to win one of these positions would probably occupy a whole chapter in Gladwell’s book, but it’s likely that one factor was that much of his competition decided to “drop out” of the race and look for jobs elsewhere. This is very similar to the advantages of the demographic trough of the 1930s—an otherwise terrible historic moment becoming a crucial advantage.

There are several other (even large) contributing factors that I can think of in my father’s story, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave you with this.