Outliers

By Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers is the story of success. Gladwell takes a look at what made the Bill Gate’s of the world so successful in the first place.

Benjamin Franklin

Gladwell opens the book by describing a statue opening ceremony for Benjamin Franklin in which the unveiler describes how Franklin rose from nothing to stand next to Kings.

Gladwell points out that “People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all 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”.

Story Of The Hockey Player

Gladwell writes that professional hockey plays tend to be born in either January or February. Why? The Canadian eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. Therefore, a boy who turns ten on January 2, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year which at a young age makes a hell of a difference. With is also seen in academic performance within academic years.

The Matthew Effect states that those who are successful are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. With success being a result of accumulative advantage. As a result, someone who is slightly better than the others when he is young will be picked to go to an advanced hockey camp, will practise more and end up vastly superior later on.

Violinists

Gladwell describes a study performed at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. The class of violinists was separated into three groups. Those who were deemed to have the potential to be world-class performers, those who were thought of as being merely good and the third being the students who were unlikely to play professionally and who intended to be music teachers. When the researchers asked the class “over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?”.

Everyone in each group started to play at around 5 years old. The elite performers had each totalled 10,000 hours of practise by the time they were 20, the good students had totalled 8,000 hours and the future teachers totalled 4,000 hours. The researchers then looked at professional pianists and saw the same pattern.

• The researchers could not find any ‘naturals’ — musicians who floated effortlessly to the top which practising a fraction of their peers time.
• The researchers could not find any ‘grinds’ — People who worked harder than anyone else, yet didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks.

To become a chess grandmaster takes about ten years. and what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. Ten thousands hours is the magic number of greatness.

The Tale Of Oppenheimer

Gladwell describes the life of famed scientist Robert Oppenheimer. While at Cambridge, Oppenheimer got annoyed at his tutor and attempted to poison him. A a result, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have regular sessions with a psychiatrist. So how was a man like Robert able to join the Manhattan project? He did so by understanding that Groves controlled the door to the project and therefore put all of his charm and talent into this one man.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls ‘practical intelligence.’ With this being a key differentiator between genius’s and people who go on to achieve great things. This intelligence is the sort that you learn from being in the write family and having an upbringing filled with culture, manners and society.

Terman Study Of The Gifted

The Terman Study of the gifted is the oldest running longitudinal study in the field of psychology. Terman found 1,444 children who were deemed as gifted to conduct his study on.

When the children reached adulthood, Termen looked at the records of the 730 men and dived them into three groups. 150 fell into what Terman called the A group — these were the true success stories. The middle 6o% were the B group those who were doing “satisfactorily”. The bottom 150 were the Cs who were those who had done the least with their superior mental ability.

So what was the difference between the As and the Cs? Terman ran through every conceivable explanation…In the end, only one thing mattered: family background.

Why The Chinese Are Better At Mathematics?

Gladwell asks the readers to memorise the list of numbers 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. He argues that if you are English you will most likely fail while if you are Chinese you will almost certainly remember it. Why?

Because as human beings we store digits in a memory lop that runs for about two seconds…And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

In his book The Number Sense, Dehaene’s explains that “Chinese number words are remarkably brief…their English equivalents…are longer…The prize for efficiency goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residence of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.”

This difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as additions, far more easily. As Asian children can remember number sequences faster and have a more logically sound numbering system they enjoy math more and therefore have a built in advantage.

The TIMSS Test

The TIMSS test is made to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s.

When student’s sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill out a laborious questionnaire. The questionnaire is so long that many students leave as many as twenty questions blank.

As it turns out the average number of items answereed on that questionaire varies from country to country…It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMMSS? They are exactly the same.