30 Books in 30 days – Remembering 15 years of the 1st Friday Book Synopsis – (Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell)

{On April 5, 2013, we will celebrate the 15^th Anniversary of the First Friday Book Synopsis, and begin our 16^th year.  During March, I will post a blog post per day remembering key insights from some of the books I have presented over the 15 years of the First Friday Book Synopsis.  We have met every first Friday of every month since April, 1998 (except for a couple of weather –related cancellations).  These posts will focus only on books I have presented.  My colleague, Karl Krayer, also presented his synopses of business books at each of these gatherings.  I am going in chronological order, from April, 1998, forward.  The fastest way to check on these posts will be at Randy’s blog entries — though there will be some additional blog posts interspersed among these 30.}
Post #23 of 30

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Synopsis presented January, 2009
Outliers:  The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. (Little, Brown, and Company.  2008).

By now, Malcolm Galdwell has added to our vocabulary twice (maybe three times) – A “tipping point;” “outliers – the 10,000 hour rule;” a “blink” decision.  He did not invent/coin these phrases.  We might call Mr. Gladwell the great finder and identifier and popularizer.  He finds ideas, and then he dwells on them, finds just the right stories to bring them to life, and then tells these stories very, very well (he is a great story teller!), so that after we read him, we understand the ideas.  And then, we begin looking for these ideas in our observations of culture, business, life…

So, in the first book The Tipping Point, which I wrote about on Day 6 of this series, he took the phrase “the tipping point,” which I think was first used in sociological circles, and made it a very useful term to describe how products and companies and ideas spread.  (I think the phrase was first used by Morton Grodzins to describe the process of white flight in suburban neighborhoods in the 1960s.  Read a little about this in the Wikipedia article).

Now, he again builds on the work of others.  In this case, primarily K. Anders Ericsson, who began by studying violinists and then pianists.  He and his colleagues made a startling discovery.  It takes 10,000 hours of practice, 10,000 hours of doing something, to get really good at it.  Ericsson and his colleagues looked at violinists, and tabulated the hours they played/practiced.  Here’s what they found.

The elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.  By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours of practice, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.

Now, the chapter in the book on “The 10,000-Hour Rule” actually begins with hockey players and soccer players.  And there, the discovery was just astonishing.  Kids who were born in the first half of the year (actually the first quarter of the year) were far more likely to be the better hockey players years later.  No, let me word that differently.  Not every kid born in the first quarter of the year turned out to be a terrific hockey player.  But, to be born late in the year put an aspiring young hockey player at a distinct disadvantage.

Why?  Because when one starts playing organized hockey for the first time, at a young age, and the coaches pick their players, the bigger, faster players get picked by the more serious coaches – the coaches who hold more practices, a lot more.  And, at a young age, the oldest kids are in fact bigger, faster, stronger.  They are, sadly, mistaken as “the better natural athletes.”  But they may not be the “better natural athletes” — they are simply bigger, faster, stronger, because at a young age, a six month age advantage is a huge! advantage.  And then, year after year, that kid keeps getting picked by those more serious coaches, because he practiced so much more the year before than players on less demanding teams, and over the course of a decade, the practice hours absolutely mount up.  By the time a hockey player is ready for big-time junior tournaments, the ones who were born early in the year, who were so much bigger and faster in that first year, experienced/enjoyed the “accumulative advantage” of far more hours of practice and playing than players born later in the year, and passed over that very first year by the better, more demanding coaches.

It’s the number of hours, stupid!

This is just one of the insights from this best-selling book.  Here are a few excerpts:

Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism:  the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.  We all know that successful people come for hardy seeds.  But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?  This is not a book about tall trees.  It’s a book about forests – and hockey is a good place to start because the explanation for who gets to the top of the hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than it looks.  In fact, it’s downright peculiar. 
Most parents, one suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away.  But it doesn’t.  The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the years persists.  It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.
Think for a moment about what the story of hockey and early birthdays says about success.  It tells us that our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic. 
It’s the “Matthew Effect.”  (from the sociologist Robert Merton).  It’s those who are successful who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.  It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks.  It’s the best students who get the best teaching and the most attention.  And it’s the biggest nine-and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice.  Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” 
Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the sport. 
The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered.

Now, what about “innate talent?”  Well, maybe…  but,

The question is this:  is there such a thing as innate talent?  “Achievement is talent plus preparation.”  The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.

I think Mr. Gladwell boils it down right here:

The people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.  They work much, much harder. 

Work ethic + more and more hours spent to get better, world-class better, at the chosen skill = mastery.

But it is not just any old 10,000 hours. It is 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice.”  Again, from the book:

“Practicing:  that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better.” 

(The perfect companion book to Outliers is Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, which I presented just two months later, in March, 2009.  Mr. Colvin develops the steps to make maximum use of a “deliberate practice” approach.  If you want to really pursue this idea of developing mastery, read these two books together).

Now, the book does much more.  Mr. Gladwell develops other ideas about “the story of success.”  It matters where you were born.  It matters the “era”/time” into which you were born.  For example, massive wealth seems to cluster together.  He has a chart of the richest people in history, and a huge percentage of them were born within a decade of each other in the United States (Rockefeller, Carnegie, et. al.).  The right place, the right time – and then, the right person.  In other words, if Bill Gates had been born a decade earlier or a decade later, he might not have quite been the full Bill Gates that we know today.  Now, a lot of folks were born then also.  So, the right time and the right place is not “enough.”  But the wrong time and the wrong place takes away a lot of possibility.

And he tells stores of why Korean Air had more plane crashes (and, how they solved the problem it — fascinating!), and why some folks from certain cultures are better at math that others.  Sections include Harlan Kentucky and Rice Paddies and Math Tests.

(Side note – if you are a fan of the FX series Justified, which I am, the chapter on Harlan Kentucky is a valuable piece of “contextual research” for you).

And, you simply must read this book to understand why the Beatles are the greatest band of all time.  (Yes, it had to do with the 10,000 hour rule, and some lengthy gigs at some strip clubs, beginning when the Beatles were not quite yet the Beatles).

Here are some “headers” from the book, which I included in my synopsis handout:

• PART ONE:  OPPORTUNITY
• Stories of “individual success”  (there is no “individual” success!) 

• PART TWO:  LEGACY
• Stories of “Group” Success (and failure)

and

• And some “observations:

1. You really are a product of your culture.
2. It really does take a lot of hard, hard work – the 10,000 hour rule really is close to an actual rule!
3. Hard work requires much intentional practice.
4. Success is the result of “accumulative advantage.”
5. Luck also plays a role…
6. “Good enough” is good enough, and all you need – if you put in the work!
7. Luck – breaks — learning by/from privilege – all really, really matter.

(He tells quite an amazing story about Robert Oppenheimer).
{ — and – maybe those soft skills really do matter}

And here is an observation important to companies, from the review by David Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal:

 “Outliers offers an implicit message for companies as well:  There is great competitive advantage for the organization recognizing that the work environment can nurture talent – and also suppress it.”

I don’t remember many books over the fifteen years that I “remember” as well as I remember the three by Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point; Blink; Outliers).  He is a very good writer, a terrific story-teller, and more than worthy of making my list of 30 books in 30 days more than once.

Let me end with this.  If the number of hours matters, then we begin to understand why the wealthier kids, as a group, do better at school.  With a house full of books, parents that likely read in front of them more often as well as read to them, summer camps, learning expeditions, they do not fully “take the summer off” from learning like less wealthy kids do.  This is an important point.  From the book:

When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session.  The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it…   For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem.  It has a summer vacation problem… 

{And, one more – a footnote — Just remember what he does day and what he does not say.  Mastery is well-nigh impossible without putting in the time, the “10,000 hours.”  But putting in the 10,000 hours does not guarantee mastery — plenty of people put in the time, and do not achieve such mastery.  Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have a new book just out, Top Dog:  The Science of Winning and Losing, that I look forward to reading that deals with this “there are other factors” issue}.

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You can purchase my synopsis of Outliers, and many of our synopses, with our comprehensive handouts, and audio recordings of our presentations, at our companion site 15minutebusinessbooks.com.  The recordings may not be studio quality, but they are understandable, usable recordings, to help you learn.
(And though the handouts are simple Word documents, in the last couple of years we have “upgraded” the look of our handouts to a graphically designed format).
We have clients who play these recordings for small groups.  They distribute the handouts, listen to the recordings together, and then have a discussion that is always some form of a “what do we have to learn, what can we do with this?” conversation.  Give it a try.