Story of Success

I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell over the past two days. The book was fascinating, and the pouring rain was an excuse to curl up by the fire and drink in Gladwell’s theories on how successful people become successful.

In one of his most interesting points, Gladwell writes, “What is the question we always ask about the successful? We want to know what they’re like–what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have been born with. And we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.”

Throughout the book, he uses numerous examples to demonstrate that while successful people are often intelligent and achievement-oriented on an individual basis, other elements like luck, history, opportunity, and cultural legacy also shaped the lives of society’s outliers: Bill Gates, Robert Oppenheimer, the Beatles.

Gladwell points out that we often try to downplay our social class and cultural heritage, mistakenly thinking that we can overcome where we’re from. Certainly, Tiger Woods has an undeniable athletic ability. However, he also inherited a belief in work that resulted from his Asian heritage: He has seen a clear relationship between effort and reward on the golf course.

Additionally, if Woods had been born in Kansas instead of Cypress, California, an area that abounds with golf courses, which in turn enabled him to begin practicing golf at the age of two, he most likely would not be the talent he is today (Gladwell theorizes that “excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice…’ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert–in anything,’ writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin”).

Woods was able to practice golf for 10,000+ hours because he grew up surrounded by golf courses and he was born with a solid work ethic and his parents believed in concerted cultivation of his natural athletic ability. The greatest golfer in the world didn’t earn that title solely by himself. Other external factors set him up for success.

Gladwell concludes, “Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs often appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky–but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

If you’re looking for a book that will challenge you and make you think, read Outliers. I’m currently contemplating how I’m going to spend my 10,000 hours–I’d love to become a world-class expert at something.