Book Review: Outliers

Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown & Company (2008)

In my opinion, this is Gladwell’s most significant and most valuable book thus far. In it, he demonstrates superior storyteller skills as he discusses several quite different situations that demonstrate that “the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are…[Those who succeed] owe something to parentage and patronage. [They] may look like they did all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot…It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” Gladwell provides many different versions of “the story of success” involving those who demonstrate what sociologists call “accumulative advantage…Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

Clearly, Gladwell agrees with Geoff Colvin that “talent is overrated.” As does Colvin, he cites the 10,000-Hour Rule (i.e. it takes approximately 10,000 hours of “deliberate,” “deep” practice under strict supervision by an expert to master almost any skill) and suggests that “once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.” The success of the various outliers whom Gladwell discusses 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.”

I urge you to check out the wealth of resources at these Web sites:

http://www.gladwell.com/bio.html

http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html

Book Review: Talent Is Overrated

Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Geoff Colvin
The Penguin Group (2008)

Colvin set out to answer this question: “What does great performance require?” In this volume, he shares several insights generated by hundreds of research studies whose major conclusions offer what seem to be several counterintuitive perspectives on what is frequently referred to as “talent.” (See Pages 6-7.) In this context, I am reminded of Thomas Edison’s observation that “vision without execution is hallucination.” If Colvin were asked to paraphrase that to indicate his own purposes in this book, my guess (only a guess) is that his response would be, “Talent without deliberate practice is latent” and agrees with Darrell Royal that “potential” means “you ain’t done it yet.”

In other words, there would be no great performances in any field (e.g. business, theatre, dance, symphonic music, athletics, science, mathematics, entertainment, exploration) without those who have, through deliberate practice developed the requisite abilities. Colvin’s point (and I agree) is that all great performers “make it look so easy” because of their commitment to deliberate practice, often for several years before their first victory. In fact, Colvin cites a “ten-year rule” widely endorsed in chess circles (attributed to Herbert Simon and William Chase) that “no one seemed to reach the top ranks of chess players without a decade or so of intensive study, and some required much more time.”

Colvin’s insights offer a reassurance that almost anyone’s performance can be improved, sometimes substantially, even if it isn’t world-class. Talent is overrated if it is perceived to be the most important factor. It isn’t. In fact, talent does not exist unless and until it is developed…and the only way to develop it is (you guessed it) with deliberate practice. When Ben Hogan was asked the “secret” to playing great golf, he replied, “It’s in the dirt.”