KEY POINTS:
New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell likes to explore the complexity behind society's common assumptions and has made his name uncovering the patterns that underlie how our culture works. The Tipping Point was about how an idea can spread like a virus, Blink looked at why first impressions do count.
In Outliers Gladwell seeks to unravel the nature of success. We believe the super successful are not like us, which is true by definition, but perhaps not for the reasons we think. Bill Gates is the uber-geek of the computer revolution.
Sure, says Gladwell, but there are smarter people and they did not create ubiquitous software empires. Mozart and the Beatles were prodigies who changed how we heard music.
Yes, says Gladwell, but their success was down to more than unburnished genius taking its rightful place. Gates, Mozart and the Beatles are statistical outliers. They rocketed above the curve of achievement, over mediocrity and our culture, which increasingly favours the instant, as in pop idols and Lotto millionaires who think their hand of fate was always a royal flush. But in Gates' case, he had a big headstart. His parents were well-to-do and enrolled young Bill in an exclusive private school that in 1968, a time when the pocket calculator was rare, had a computer terminal with a direct link to an early corporate mainframe.
In one seven-month period the 13-year-old Gates and his buddies put in eight hours a day, seven days a week, programming. The Beatles had Hamburg. To make a living, the fledgling band performed 270 nights over a span of about 18 months. Before they had their first hit, they had performed live at least 1200 times, more than some contemporary bands have ever performed.
Mozart was a child prodigy, but it was the music he wrote as a grown-up rather than a 10-year-old that earned him immortality. Gladwell's point, backed by research, is that to achieve virtuoso level in any discipline takes at least 10,000 hours of practice. This is not to say that if I spent 10,000 hours programming a mainframe, it would change the world of personal computing. For one thing, I was born too late.
Gladwell argues that Gates had timing on his side. The university dropout arrived at adulthood at the right age to take advantage of IBM's fatal decision to get out of personal computing. This paradigm shift (or what Gladwell might now call a tipping point) meant that if you were not too young to consider it, nor at an age encumbered with career, children and mortgages and had had the right skills and experience in 1975, you too would have had a heightened chance of creating your own software empire.
Gladwell considers the ideal time to take advantage of this particular junction of the computer revolution would require a birth date in 1954 or 1955. Gates was born October 28, 1955 and, spookily, his rival, Apple's Steve Jobs, first drew breath on February 24, 1955. Here's Gladwell's argument: "We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit." Gates and the Beatles had talent and intelligence, but they also had experience, opportunity and timing. "Their success was not just of their making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up," Gladwell continues.
In Outliers Gladwell remains the intellectual magpie. He roves from an ethnic theory of plane crashes that will change forever how we should book flights, to the feuds of hillbilly Harlan County and why Asian kids are good at maths. He has lost none of his fluency and knack for locating fascinating anecdotes but the verve that drove previous books feels forced. Haven't we always suspected that nurture has more to do with success than nature? Should Gladwell really be surprised that poor inner city kids given the right opportunities excel as well as those in more affluent parts of town?
Nor will it be news to any teacher that hard work and practice lead to achievement. The questions Gladwell poses in Outliers contrive a mystery where none exists. This does not detract from an engrossing series of yarns, with an epilogue that comes close to memoir, but ultimately the sum is less than its parts.
Outliers: The Story of Success
By Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane $37)
* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland reviewer.
