I’m not sure why it took so long to read Malcolm Gladwell‘s latest book Outliers: The Story of Success but I’m sure glad its just as enjoyable as his books The Tipping Point and Blink. As defined scientifically Outliers is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Gladwell not only shares compelling stories regarding outliers, but shines in conveying the impact of globalization for math students, airline pilots and more importantly control tower operators in NYC.
Gladwell shares that “The Story of Success” is really interesting when you dig deep into statistics. Gladwell addresses this with hockey players. Yes, hockey players. There is something amazing about playing a game on ice. Hockey requires speed and grace. The fact that its not played on grass, sand or wood makes you wonder if there is “one talent” shared by the best hockey players in the world.
Researchers found that great players actually all fall within birth dates ranging from January to April for hockey and even for most soccer teams. And as Gladwell points out the best hockey players like Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretsky, Steve Yzerman, Mario Lemiux and Dominik Hasek all have birth dates that allowed them to play against kids a year younger than them — and to no surprise they were handpicked (at some early stage) to further develop their skills.
Gladwell has taken an interesting angle regarding “success” in what some might even call perfection. Gladwell tells the story of Bill Joy who not only happened to be at the University of Michigan at the right time (to study computing) but more importantly, took the time to spend countless hours learning and programming when he received access to the mainframe at school. Actually Gladwell adds up those hours in his chapter called “The 10,000 hour rule” and points out that ‘talent’ can be achieved in 5 years when you practice 5.5 hours everyday. Once you cross that measurement you have positioned yourself for success. Joy invented BSD Unix and Java.
The same 10,000 hour rule even applied to The Beatles who “had to play for 8 hours” in a strip club in Germany before crossing the Atlantic and ultimately rock n roll fame. Can you imaging some chap telling his wife he saw them play for hours and hours…funny, but true. Wonder what the impact would have been in America if word had gotten out about how they perfected their music?
